The People, Yes

Through a distinguished photographic, cinematic, and academic career spanning nearly half a century, Jerome Liebling has shown us what filmmaker Ken Burns (a former Liebling student) calls "the drama that exists not in Hollywood and the imagination, but in the myriad heroic acts of merely being on this planet." Liebling's images are startlingly unadorned, sometimes ironically witty depictions of people, animals, and environments, all of which refuse to surrender to time or circumstance without a fight. Liebling captures this ordinary valor with a compassion devoid of sentimentality, judgment, or manipulation.
Titled after Carl Sandburg's poetic epic, The People, Yes gathers together more than 100 of Liebling's most indelible images. From the stoic purity of a Shaker community to the vibrancy of unbowed old age; from the stark hubbub of 1940s New York City to the wistful solitude of Emily Dickinson's Amherst; from the infirmary to the handball court; from light to dark and surprise to shock, then back again - Liebling applauds the essential dignity and integrity with which even the humblest among us confront our lives.
With stills from Liebling's influential documentary films, and enriched by the photographer's own notes, The People, Yes pays homage - long overdue - to one of our finest practitioners and teachers of film and photography.