ATHENS, GA (PNAN) – On view through January 8, 2023, at the Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia, “Reckonings and Reconstructions: Southern Photography from the Do Good Fund” is the first large-scale survey that charts a visual narrative of the ever-changing American South from the 1950s to the present.
The collection includes images by more than 25 Guggenheim Fellows, five Magnum Photographers and two Henri Cartier-Bresson Award winners as well as prints by lesser-known or emerging photographers from the region.
Themes of land, labor, law and protest, food, ritual and kinship link contrasting works in the fund’s collection. Works by a diverse group of photographers in gender, race, ethnicity and region features 125 photographs by 73 artists, including Gordon Parks, Sheila Pree Bright, Mark Steinmetz, Michael Stipe and William Christenberry.
Together they capture southern history, culture and identity in all their complexity and contradictions. In so doing, they resist notions of the South as a retrograde region and instead present the enigmatic, “ever-changing” qualities of the place and its people: a region where despair and hope, terror and beauty, pain and joy, and indignity and dignity commingle; a place seeking reconciliation and restoration, captured by photographers with an ethical vision for a “Better South.”
The show asks various key questions: How do photographs navigate the interface between nature and culture in the South, as well as the ravages of extraction and sprawl? How do photographers string together histories of quotidian labor and caretaking along with the region’s painful histories of enslaved and incarcerated labor? How have photographs captured the performance of southern community and identity through civic and religious rituals? How has the medium signaled exclusion and estrangement, yet also belonging and kinship in the American South?
For more information on associated events, see https://georgiamuseum.org or call 706.542.4662. Editor’s note: The exhibition will travel to the Chrysler Museum of Art August 11, 2023; Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, February 8, 2024, and the Figge Art Museum on June 15, 2024.