Contemporary artists dust off city’s hidden history for ACP show

"Jan Banning: Down and Out in the South." Oct. 18-31. Big House Gallery, 211 Peter St., Atlanta. www.bighousegallery.com

Photobook Fair. 10 a.m.-1 p.m. Oct. 20. Piedmont Park Community Center, 1071 Piedmont Ave., Atlanta. www.piedmontpark.org

"Laurel Nakadate: Photographs, Videos & Performances." Oct. 12-Dec. 16. Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, 535 Means St., Atlanta. www.thecontemporary.org

"3 Feet Above Sea Level: A Pinhole Exploration of the French Quarter, New Orleans." Featuring work by Terrell Clark. Through Oct. 27. Sight+Sound Gallery, 659 Auburn, Ave., Atlanta., www.sightandsoundgallery.com

16th annual Open Juried Exhibition / Roswell Photographic Society. Oct. 6-Nov. 18. Roswell Visual Arts Center and Gallery, 10495 Woodstock Road, Roswell. www.roswellphotosociety.org

For complete schedule, log on to www.acpinfo.org.

Atlanta has been accused of being in such a mad rush forward, it risks forgetting the past. The “City Too Busy to Hate” can also be the city so distracted by forward momentum it forgets to take an instructive look in the rear view mirror.

Atlanta-based photographer Sheila Pree Bright is interested in making sure the city hangs onto its origins, especially when it comes to the presence of African-American culture in Atlanta’s past. In a fascinating spectrum of projects Bright has catalogued black life in Atlanta whether in her photo series “Suburbia,” which documents a prosperous African-American middle class in the city, or in her humorous portraits of African-American men sporting elaborate gold teeth, or “grills,” in the series “In High Def.”

In her latest body of work, debuting Oct. 5 at the Atlanta Preservation Center’s Drawing Room Gallery, Bright looks at the hidden-in-plain sight presence of African-American culture deep in the heart of Buckhead.

Bright is one of the six photographers exploring Atlanta’s rapidly changing past through their art work in the exhibition “Re-Placing Atlanta.” The show coincides with the annual October celebration of all things photographic — Atlanta Celebrates Photography — which has featured a diverse array of photography at galleries, museums, coffee shops and alternative spaces throughout the city for the past 14 years.

“Re-Placing Atlanta” at Grant Park’s Atlanta Preservation Center is a double whammy of history. This exhibition about the past is featured in a venue equally indebted to Atlanta’s history. The Atlanta Preservation Center is located in the Lemuel P. Grant Mansion, a three-story, Italianate antebellum home built in 1856 named for the Atlanta railroad magnate and philanthropist who donated land to form Grant Park.

“We somehow convinced five local treasures from the photo community to agree to pick an endangered Atlanta site, building, or landmark and create a unique piece based on his or her experience with whatever they chose,” said curator Constance Lewis, who organized the show along with art critic Jerry Culum.

The artists created new work to highlight the often hidden historic buildings that dot Atlanta. “It’s so often that we, in a community don’t pay attention enough to the treasures in our own back yard,” said Lewis. “Jerry and I both wanted to take this opportunity to raise questions to a local viewing audience who might, in turn, pay a little more attention to their own social, historical and physical landscape,” said Lewis.

Speaking to Atlanta’s history of both racial conflict and solidarity, Bright documented an unusual historical anachronism dwelling in the heart of one of Atlanta’s most prosperous neighborhoods.

Amidst the lush green lawns and stately homes of Buckhead, she discovered a small wood-frame church on Arden Road — the New Hope African Methodist Episcopal Church. Established in the late 1800s, the church’s congregation was once made up of ex-slaves and the servants of wealthy white families in the neighborhood. Bright, whose work has often dealt with racial identity, was fascinated by the juxtaposition of this landmark of African-American culture deep in the heart of a predominately white neighborhood.

“For it to still be in the neighborhood I felt was amazing,” said Bright. Her contribution to “Re-Placing Atlanta” captures the humble but beautifully maintained church and its adjacent graveyard with its hints of complex personal histories written on tombstones.

Appearing in the exhibition alongside Bright are the artists John Dean, Jody Fausett, David Knox and Marcia Vaitsman. Their approaches to Atlanta’s history are unique, but in many instances interconnected.

Fausett, who has often photographed the interiors of his extended family’s homes, decided to train his camera on one of architect Philip Trammell Shutze’s elegant Buckhead mansions, the Goodrum House, on West Paces Ferry, currently undergoing extensive renovation. Knox has reinterpreted original photographic and archival documents of the 1864 Battle of Atlanta.

The only artist who didn’t create original work for “Re-Placing Atlanta” is “Panorama Ray” Herbert, a long-time fixture on the Atlanta art scene who died in 1997 but whose work documenting the distinctive Atlanta neighborhood of Cabbagetown in panoramic photographs has endured after his death.

“Ray, we thought, is a good example of how a photographer created a very recognizable definition of his own backyard. He was an outsider who fell in love with Atlanta and captured its rapidly changing landscape within a frame that was undeniably his own,” said Lewis.

Creating work for the exhibition had an unexpected outcome for at least one of the artists. Bright, who typically works in portraiture, has decided to undertake a whole new project centered on photographing Deep South landscapes.

“It made me go into doing a new body of work to do with the Civil Rights era,” said Bright. Places like New Hope Church or the Southern streets where the Freedom Riders walked, said Bright, “are like remnants of African American culture that we don’t know about. And I find that fascinating.”