Art review: Southern eccentricities, landscape intrigue Alec Soth

Bottom line: A celebrated photographer offers a beautifully rendered but not necessarily telling take on the South.

Those of us who live in the South know it as a quirky, exotic, sometimes scary place. But it’s also one of the few regions left in America with any sort of mystery and close-to-the-surface history, when so much of the country seems to have become a featureless, generic outdoor mall. Thus the avidity with which some photographers take up camera to document the region: Few places offer the rich rewards in characters and landscape that the South does, even as Southerners may cringe at another shutterbug headed their way with a camera set to “capture” our wily nature.

Since 1996, the High Museum of Art has commissioned photographers to treat the South as their subject in the "Picturing the South" series, often featuring big names like Richard Misrach and Emmet Gowin. And any number of high-profile photographers have taken a spin through the land of kudzu and decaying mansions — Andrew Moore took a solemn measure of the region in a recent exhibition at Jackson Fine Art, British shooter Martin Parr has offered a freak show spin.

Minneapolis-based photographer Alec Soth (who has also done work for the "Picturing the South" series) and his writer friend Brad Zellar continued their longtime conceptual masquerade as a small-town newspaper photographer and reporter on their 2,400-mile perambulation down Dixie way for "Georgia Dispatch," 19 black-and-white photographs on view at SCAD's Gallery 1600.

And speaking of kudzu, to non-locals the stuff is like Justin Bieber to tweens. It’s nearly impossible, it seems, to document the South without at least one image charting its landscape-consuming march through the region.

Soth succumbs to the lore of kudzu in “Near Gainesville, Georgia,” where an entire wood frame house shot from a low angle looks like it’s being swallowed up by the stuff, a tiny boat floating on a churning wave of green. The South’s remarkable foliage always seems a special revelation to photographers, and Soth is no different, shooting a glade in the “Okefenokee Swamp” of moss-draped pine trees ringing a lagoon so lush it could be a Disney simulacrum.

Soth, like other photographers before him, is drawn to the shambling, messy, antiquated, old-school charms of the region: a decaying plane in “Fort Benning (Fuselage),” the downtown Atlanta skyscrapers seen through the frame of weed-choked vacant lots, and the grizzled, white-bearded Civil War re-enactor looking like a Victorian-era death portrait as he takes a catnap in full uniform in “Charles Roark. Chickamauga.”

Even if things aren’t falling apart, they can seem utterly archaic as seen through Soth’s lens, like the two white-haired dames in “Mrs. John Beauchamp Coppedge and Mrs. Dudley Ottley Sr. Piedmont Driving Club. Atlanta,” wearing the steely expressions of 250-pound NFL linebackers psyching out their opponent, manning the entrance to the Piedmont Driving Club like Cerberus guarding the gates to hell.

Will Southerners learn something new about themselves based on these images? Most likely not: We tend to already know the region as a study in contrasts, of black and white, rich and poor, refined and squalid and regularly eaten alive by kudzu. But there are some images that challenge even those rich dualities, like the foursome captured in “Fort Benning. (Crystal Padgett),” two heavily tattooed adults with two mixed-race children in tow. If most of these images affirm a popular idea of the South as something folksy, peculiar and married to tradition, that image speaks to the changing nature of the place.

Soth is nothing if not a skilled master of framing and gradations of light. His “Georgia Dispatch” images have an aged, weathered quality that brings to mind Mike Disfarmer. They are rich with character and funk, even if they don’t necessarily give us anything new or revelatory to chew on.