Description

In 2021, the High Museum will celebrate the 25th Anniversary of its “Picturing the South” photographic commission series with a pair of exhibitions showcasing the series and the museum’s significant permanent holdings of photographs of the South. Launched in 1996, the “Picturing the South” commission selects photographers from across the world to engage with the South’s complex social and geographic landscape. The program is unique in its longevity, commitment to place, and diversity of perspectives. The High will simultaneously present “Another Land: Photography in the South since 1840,” the exhibition for which it seeks funding, featuring the museum’s extensive collection of Southern photography from the nineteenth century to the present,
 
The High began acquiring photographs in the early 1970s, and today holds over 8,000 prints spanning the history of the medium. These include the most significant museum collection of vintage Civil-Rights-Era photographs, as well as important works by such major figures as Walker Evans, Harry Callahan, William Christenberry, and Dawoud Bey. The High has become one of the largest repositories for the photographic work of the South, while also providing a platform for nationally significant photographic exploration and innovation.
 
The anniversary “Picturing the South” exhibition will examine the project’s transformative contributions to contemporary photography by assembling all of the bodies of work from its 25-year history. Approximately 150 photographs by 15 artists, drawn primarily from the High’s collection, will offer contemporary perspectives on a region that has undergone rapid change in the past quarter-century. Several of the resulting bodies of work have become iconic photography, including landscapes by Sally Mann, and Richard Misrach’s documentation of the Mississippi Delta’s “Cancer Alley.” The 25th anniversary commissions will support An-My Lê’s exploration of Vietnamese, Muslim, and Mexican immigrant communities in the American South; and Jim Goldberg consideration of historic sitesof Southern photography that remain largely segregated today.
 
“Another Land” will examine the ways in which photographers have articulated the distinct and evolving character of the South’s people, landscape, and culture, and reckoned with its fraught history. It will demonstrate how photography in the South profoundly shaped the medium in multiple ways, from the Civil War photographs that transformed the practice of the medium and established visual codes for national identity and collective trauma, to the Farm Security Administration photographs of the thirties and forties, that defined a new form of documentary practice. Photography of the Southern Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s will be powerfully featured. The exhibition will seek to articulate the ways in which many of the urgent questions we face today about what defines American identity and experience—the legacies of slavery and racism, poverty, environmental disaster,
immigration, the changes wrought by a modern, global economy—have been compellingly explored in the photography of the South. It will reconsider the notion of regionalism itself –why and how the South has long been cast as “another land”— by exploring and highlighting the connections and exchanges between the regional and the national.
 
A catalogue blending the contents of the two exhibitions will be published by Aperture; and a  combined version of the exhibitions will travel to additional venues in 2022 and 2023. Other features of the project will include a scholarly symposium, a series of artists’ talks, and a dedicated exhibition website.
 
Grant funds would support project staff and costs associated with the preparation and installation of “Another Land,” the exhibition catalogue, and public programs.