ExhibitionsA Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845
Current Exhibition

A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845

September 15, 2023 – January 14, 2024

RaMell Ross (American, born 1982), iHome, 2013, pigmented inkjet print, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from the Marilyn and Donald Keough Family Foundation, 2022.159. © RaMell Ross.

Tickets

Reserve

Members and Museum Pass: Free
Not-Yet-Members: $18.50

The South has occupied an uneasy place in the history of photography as both an example of regional exceptionalism and as the crucible from which American identity has been forged. As the first major survey of Southern photography in twenty-five years, this exhibition examines that complicated history and reveals the South’s critical impact on the evolution of the medium, posing timely questions about American culture and character. 

Featuring many works from the High’s extensive collection, A Long Arc presents photographs of the American Civil War, which transformed the practice of photography across the nation and established visual codes for articulating national identity and expressing collective trauma. Photographs from the 1930s to the 1950s, featuring many created for the Farm Security Administration, demonstrate how that era defined a new kind of documentary aesthetic that dominated American photography for decades and included jarring and unsettling pictures exposing economic and racial disparities. With works drawn from the High’s unparalleled collection of civil rights–era photography, the exhibition shows how photographs of the movement in the decade that followed galvanized the nation with raw depictions of violence and the struggle for justice. Contemporary photography featured in the exhibition demonstrates how photographers working today continue to explore Southern history and themes to grasp American identity. 

The South cleaves toward old ways. But these are not old times, and this distinction is crucial to understand. The South is not ‘backwards’; it is palimpsestic and ritualistic, filled with people living the ravages of history. Revision and transformation are possible; however, that replay requires new ways of seeing.

—Imani Perry

2nd Regiment, United States Colored Light Artillery, Battery A: Ram, ca. 1864

Organized in Nashville in 1864 and dispatched until 1866, Battery A of the 2nd regiment of the US Colored Light Artillery accompanied the infantry and cavalry troops into battle with horse-drawn cannons. More than twenty-five thousand Black artillerymen, many of whom were freedmen from Confederate states, served in the Union Army. Artillerymen, including the cannoneers shown here, were required to handle hundreds of pounds of supplies, such as the gun, its limber, a traveling forge, and caissons to store the ammunition. Though many batteries were relegated to everyday garrison duty, Battery A fought in the Battle of Nashville in December 1864, where these photographs chronicling the loading and firing of the gun may have been taken.

Unidentified Photographer, 2nd Regiment, United States Colored Light Artillery, Battery A: Ram, ca. 1864, albumen silver print, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from the Lucinda Weil Bunnen Fund and the Donald Marilyn Keough Family, 2021.275.

2nd Regiment, United States Colored Light Artillery, Battery A: Ram, ca. 1864

Bonsil’s Photo Gallery, Chattanooga, TN, 1865

Isaac H. Bonsall was one of many enterprising photographers who took advantage of the public’s rising interest in photography, especially studio portraits, during the onset of the Civil War. These photographs allowed sitters to strengthen bonds with their loved ones, reinvent themselves, and construct personal histories. In 1862, the New-York Tribune published an observer’s account of the onslaught of traveling portrait studios among the army: “A camp is hardly pitched before one of the omnipresent artists in collodion and amber [. . .] pitches his canvas gallery and unpacks his chemicals.” For these armies, photography became a tether to both reality and fantasy.

Isaac H. Bonsall (American, 1833–1909), Bonsil’s Photo Gallery, Chattanooga, TN, 1865, albumen silver print, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from the Lucinda Weil Bunnen Fund and the Donald and Marilyn Keough Family, 2021.269.

Isaac H. Bonsall (American, 1833–1909) Bonsil’s Photo Gallery, Chattanooga, TN, 1865

St. Charles Street, New Orleans, 1900

William Henry Jackson (American, 1843–1942), St. Charles Street, New Orleans, 1900, chromolithograph, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of Joshua Mann Pailet in memory of Charlotte Mann Pailet (1924–1999), 1999.176.

William Henry Jackson American, 1843–1942 St. Charles Street, New Orleans, 1900

Whittier Preparatory School, Phoebus, Va., 1907

In the years following the Civil War, numerous schools were founded throughout the South to educate the emancipated Black population. Literacy, which plantation overseers strictly forbade, became a beacon of hope and accomplishment for Black Americans. The dedication to education was so strong among freed peoples that the literacy gap between White and Black communities in the South closed within a generation. The Whittier School, photographed by Harlem portraitist James Van Der Zee, was distinguished among its peer institutions for its expanded curriculum, including classes up to ninth grade that encompassed art and music education and dedicated science facilities. 

James Van Der Zee (American, 1886–1983), Whittier Preparatory School, Phoebus, Va., 1907, gelatin silver print, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase, 74.143 B.

Whittier Preparatory School, Phoebus, Va., 1907

West Virginia, 1935 

Walker Evans (American, 1903–1975), West Virginia, 1935, gelatin silver print, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from the Atlanta Foundation, 75.45.

Evans P. 163 West Virginia Boy Sitting Santa O3

Courthouse Town, Grenada, 1935

Though known as a Southern Gothic writer, Eudora Welty was also an accomplished photographer. After college, she returned to her home state of Mississippi and was hired as a publicity agent for the Works Progress Administration, documenting through writing and photography the effects of the Great Depression. What began as clerical documentation turned into a rich photography practice that she pursued until 1950. She writes, “In both cases, writing and photography, you were trying to portray what you saw, and truthfully. Portray life, living people, as you saw them. And a camera could catch that fleeting moment, which is what a short story, in all its depth, tries to do.”

Eudora Welty (American, 1909–2001), Courthouse Town, Grenada, 1935, gelatin silver print, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of McKinsey & Company, 2020.35.

Eudora Welty American, 1909–2001 Courthouse Town, Grenada, 1935

Ondria Tanner and Her Grandmother Window-Shopping, Mobile, Alabama, 1956

Gordon Parks was the first African American photographer to work for LIFE, the preeminent picture magazine of the day. While at LIFE, he published some of the twentieth century’s most iconic photo essays about social justice. In 1956, the magazine published Parks’s “Segregation Story,” a photo essay comprising twenty-six color photographs depicting a multigenerational family in Alabama. Despite the grave danger he faced as a Black photographer working in the South at the height of Jim Crow, Parks firmly believed that photographs could alter a viewer’s perspective and expose a wide readership to the pervasive effects of racial segregation.

Gordon Parks (American, 1912–2006), Ondria Tanner and Her Grandmother Window-Shopping, Mobile, Alabama, 1956, inkjet print, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of The Gordon Parks Foundation, 2014.386.8.

Gordon Parks (American, 1912–2006), Ondria Tanner and Her Grandmother Window-Shopping, Mobile, Alabama, 1956

Untitled, 1963

An optician from Lexington, Kentucky, Ralph Eugene Meatyard worked at the edges of photographic practice, geographically and conceptually outside the mainstream of modernism. Though he considered himself a “dedicated amateur,” he became widely known for his staged scenes that disrupt the everyday by suggesting an absurd fantasy set in banal suburban environs. These scenes, which often feature props such as rubber masks and his family as actors, were informed by his Southern Gothic literary interests and drew on his imagination in search of inner truths amid the ordinary. In this photograph of his son Christopher surrounded by masks in a bucolic field, Meatyard considers youthful innocence while reckoning with mortality.

Ralph Eugene Meatyard (American, 1925–1972), Untitled, 1963, gelatin silver print, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift in honor of Edward Anthony Hill, 2018.69.

Ralph Eugene Meatyard (American, 1925–1972), Untitled, 1963

Sanitation Workers assemble in front of Clayborn Temple for a solidarity march, Memphis, Tennessee, 1968

In early 1968, a malfunctioning garbage truck caused the deaths of sanitation workers Echol Cole and Robert Walker, sparking Black sanitation workers to strike to demand better working conditions and higher pay. This strike, which lasted from February 12 to April 16, caught the attention of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and aligned with his Poor People’s Campaign, expanding the scope of the civil rights movement to include advocating for workers’ rights. Ernest Withers, a Memphis-based freelance photographer, documented this moment on March 28, when King, less than a week before his assassination, led a march in support of the striking workers, who wore sandwich boards stating, “I Am a Man,” demanding to be treated with dignity.

Ernest C. Withers (American, 1922–2007), Sanitation Workers assemble in front of Clayborn Temple for a solidarity march, Memphis, Tennessee, 1968, gelatin silver print, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from the Director’s Circle, 2002.24.1.

2002.24.1 Withers O3

Domestic workers waiting for the bus, Atlanta, Georgia, April, 1983

In the tradition of Robert Frank’s book The Americans, Joel Sternfeld embarked on a nationwide road trip for his American Prospects, which grappled with the state of the country during the Reagan era. Here, three Black women are the only signs of life in a Sandy Springs, Georgia, neighborhood. Driveways segment parcels of land within the seemingly endless subdivision, emphasizing the primary mode of transport for the affluent residents. By contrast, the women wait for public transportation to ferry them to and from their jobs maintaining their employers’ homes. Sternfeld’s critical stance lays bare the region’s income and racial inequalities, still present twenty years after the civil rights movement.

Joel Sternfeld (American, born 1944), Domestic workers waiting for the bus, Atlanta, Georgia, April, 1983, dye coupler print, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of Dr. Judy and Kevin Wolman, 2017.466.

Joel Sternfeld, Domestic workers waiting for the bus, Atlanta, Georgia, April, 1983

Blowing Bubbles, 1987

Sally Mann is well known for her deeply personal photographs of her children growing up within the rural landscape around their home in Lexington, Virginia. Precarity and play operate simultaneously in this photograph as her daughters perch on chairs on the back deck. The eldest, Jessie, looks away through a blur of blown bubbles, while Virginia grasps her jumpsuit and peers at the camera with a furrowed brow that counters the carefree quality of her age. Past and present overlap as they play at the family cabin that Mann herself enjoyed as a child, and the dark vignette and areas of soft focus evoke childhood memory.

Sally Mann (American, born 1951), Blowing Bubbles, 1987, gelatin silver print, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from Lucinda W. Bunnen for the Bunnen Collection, 1995.177.

Sally Mann American, born 1951 Blowing Bubbles, 1987

Limbeth and Karim, 2021

José Ibarra Rizo’s series Somewhere In Between documents the Latine immigrant experience in the American South, an experience he shares and one that is marked by a sense of being pulled between two cultures. Rizo’s tender photographs focus on a community that is ubiquitous in the region yet often misrepresented in popular media and political debates. Limbeth and Karim, a portrait of a young couple embracing, emphasizes intimate care and personal connection, thereby countering narratives that malign migrants in the United States.

José Ibarra Rizo (American, born Mexico, 1992), Limbeth and Karim, 2021, pigmented inkjet print, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of Dr. Joe B. Massey, 2022.252.

José Ibarra Rizo (American, born Mexico, 1992) Limbeth and Karim, 2021

A Closer Look: Exploring A Long Arc

This exhibition is organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta

Major funding for this exhibition is provided by the Henry Luce Foundation

Premier Exhibition Series Sponsor 

Premier Exhibition Series Supporters

ACT Foundation, Inc.
William N. Banks, Jr.
Cousins Foundation
Burton M. Gold
Sarah and Jim Kennedy 

Benefactor Exhibition Series Supporters 

Robin and Hilton Howell  

Ambassador Exhibition Series Supporters

Mrs. Fay S. Howell/The Howell Fund
Karen and Jeb Hughes/Corporate Environments
Loomis Charitable Foundation
The Fred and Rita Richman Fund
Louise Sams and Jerome Grilhot
Mrs. Harriet H. Warren
Elizabeth and Chris Willett

Contributing Exhibition Series Supporters 

Farideh and Al Azadi 
Sandra and Dan Baldwin
Mr. Joseph H. Boland, Jr.
Mr. and Mrs. Robin E. Delmer
Peggy Foreman
Mr. and Mrs. Baxter Jones
Joel Knox and Joan Marmo 
Massey Charitable Trust
Margot and Danny McCaul 
Wade A. Rakes II and Nicholas Miller
USI Insurance Services 

Generous support is also provided by  

Alfred and Adele Davis Exhibition Endowment Fund , Anne Cox Chambers Exhibition Fund , Barbara Stewart Exhibition Fund, Dorothy Smith Hopkins Exhibition Endowment Fund, Eleanor McDonald Storza Exhibition Endowment Fund, The Fay and Barrett Howell Exhibition Fund, Forward Arts Foundation Exhibition Endowment Fund, Helen S. Lanier Endowment Fund, John H. and Wilhelmina D. Harland Exhibition Endowment Fund, Katherine Murphy Riley Special Exhibition Endowment Fund, Margaretta Taylor Exhibition Fund, RJR Nabisco Exhibition Endowment Fund.