After college, he was granted Conscientious Objector status to the draft and spent two and a half years in Tucson, Arizona, where he taught nursery school as his alternative service.
In July 2012, Amberg began serving as a visiting artist at Duke University, working specifically with a Literacy Project for middle-school students in Madison County.
He lives with his wife, Leslie Stilwell, "on a small farm where they raise gardens and shitake mushrooms, tend an assortment of animals, burn firewood, and drink water from a mountain spring.
Images range from landscape shots taken before and during construction of an interstate highway in the N.C. mountains, to portraits of individuals and families affected by the changes in rural culture.
[12] In 1994, Amberg began documenting the progress of a new highway, the largest earth moving project in North Carolina history, passing through the most rural and rugged reaches of Madison County.
[13] Rob Amberg's exhibition Sodom Laurel and Sheila Kay Adams' banjo playing, traditional ballad singing, and storytelling were featured at Art6 in 2004, several months after that gallery's transition from Artspace in Richmond, Virginia.