Since 1996 the High Museum has commissioned nine photographers to document Dixie in a series called “Picturing the South.”
For the latest installment of the series, the High looked to British documentary photographer Martin Parr, Dallas-based veteran war photographer (and one-time Atlanta resident) Kael Alford and Vermont-born Shane Lavalette to imagine the South in pictures. Their three bodies of work offer radically different visions of the region.
Parr trained his camera on Atlanta, a decision residents of the city may shudder at, considering his point of view. While there is some charm in isolated Parr portraits, like the one of waitresses at the timeless meat-and-three restaurant the Silver Skillet, too many of Parr’s images imagine Atlanta as a blaring riot of obnoxious color, filled with dumbfounded airport commuters and plates and mouths heaped with food. It’s a world of gluttony, conspicuous displays of wealth and gaudy surfaces.
A welcome antidote to Parr’s grotesques is the far more plangent, heartfelt vision of the South -- laced with social commentary to give it depth -- offered in Alford and Lavalette’s work. The photographers take note of the region’s beauty, its sadness and its inescapable failings, too.
Alford, who has family ties to the coastal region of Louisiana she documents in her series “Bottom of da Boot,” depicts the depressing spectacle of a way of life literally slipping into the ocean. She hones in on the ramshackle houses and backyards filled with beer cans, the children growing up with a compromised future and the land itself being slowly eroded. Not only poverty, but also a defiant sense of identity come through in these darkly romantic images.
Lavalette, who is not from the region but is deeply invested in its music, shows a clear interest in the South’s artistic and topographical idiosyncrasies. Lavalette digs down into a marrow of isolation -- the creative isolation of the gospel singers and banjo players he documents -- but also into the yawning physical isolation of the region. Images of a young African-American boy grasping a worn basketball on an empty court or the open fields and quiet kitchen tables where his subjects gather convey a visceral sense of contemplative quiet.
A show sure to elicit strong responses from audiences, “Picturing the South” is paired with an exhibition that spotlights the ongoing collaborative relationship between the High and the Museum of Modern Art. Comprised of almost 150 photographs from MoMA’s collection, the show is a feast of riches from photography’s greats: Irving Penn, Diane Arbus, Henri Cartier-Bresson.
It is a portrait of a city that mashes up New York’s underbelly in Weegee’s images, with Paul Strand’s moody streetscape “Wall Street” that captures all that is thrillingly dark, glistening and beautiful about the city. It is a crash course in the 20th century seen through the lens of New York, an often rewarding tour through humanity’s scrapbook.
Bottom line: Some deeply poetic work and a few misfires in these photographic surveys of the South and the Big Apple.
Art Review
"Picturing New York: Photographs from The Museum of Modern Art/Picturing the South: New Commissions from the High Museum of Art"
Through Sept. 2. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays; 10 a.m.-8 p.m. Thursdays; noon-5 p.m. Sundays. $18; $15, students and seniors; $11, ages 6-17; free, children 5 and younger and members. High Museum of Art, 1280 Peachtree St. N.E., Atlanta. 404-733-4444, www.high.org.
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