Hear the voices of White Furniture Factory employees, interviewed by the Southern Oral History Program. The following are a wide selection of audio excerpts drawn from the interviews and originally featured at a museum exhibition of Bamberger's "Closing" photography: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 |

For further information about Bill Bamberger's project, visit the award-winning website dedicated to Closing.




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Closing: The Life and Death of an American Factory

Bill Bamberger
Photographer Bill Bamberger's award-winning Closing: The Life and Death of an American Factory (DoubleTake Books/Norton, 1998) portrays the final months of operation of the White Furniture Co. plant in his hometown of Mebane, North Carolina. Heralded for making documentary art meaningful in a community's daily life, Closing was the culmination of "Memory and Community: The White Furniture Co. of Mebane 1881-1993," an oral history and photography project co-sponsored by the SOHP and the Mebane Arts Council with funding from the North Carolina Humanities Council.

Winner of the Mayflower Prize in non-fiction and a semifinalist for the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, Closing
Closing: Quitting Time, Sanding Room
features color and black and white photographs taken by Bamberger over five months of intensive work at the factory, along with text by Cathy Davidson. Images from the book were exhibited at the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of American History, the Yale University Art Gallery, and the North Carolina Museum of Art, as well as in the old Jones Department Store in downtown Mebane.

Closing: Jane in the Rub-and-Pack Department
One Month Before Closing
Media coverage of the book and exhibit included CBS Sunday Morning, C-SPAN2's About Books, the New York Times, and NPR's All Things Considered. Archived in the Southern Historical Collection at UNC-CH are 31 interviews collected in Mebane by the SOHP in conjunction with the "Memory and Community" project.

Want to hear more?
  • Hear the voices of White Furniture Factory employees, interviewed by the Southern Oral History Program. The following are a wide selection of audio excerpts drawn from the interviews and originally featured at a museum exhibition of Bamberger's "Closing" photography: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 |

For further information about Bill Bamberger's project, visit the award-winning website dedicated to Closing.



The Southern Oral History Program
(a component of the UNC Center for the Study of the American South)
CB#9127, 406 Hamilton Hall
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-9127
(919) 962-0455
info@sohp.org