Coastal Georgia over time: Photographers aim lens at same spots in exhibit
SAVANNAH — Upon entering the heavy chartreuse doors of Laney Contemporary, a westside gallery here housed in a Brutalist Lee J. Meyer building, viewers are met with three black-and-white images.
In one, raindrops spark like fireflies against a marsh muted by a storm. In the other two, fog settles over quiet waterscapes.
The photographs span nearly 50 years and two different photographers, Jack Leigh and Parker Stewart, who never met. Leigh died in 2004, when Stewart was barely a tween.
But there is plenty of connective tissue binding their images of coastal Georgia and South Carolina at “Jack Leigh and Parker Stewart: In Place,” a 43-piece exhibit on view through Aug. 1.
There is Leigh’s photo of the hollow-eyed bird girl that once marked the Trosdal family plot in Bonaventure Cemetery. The image was commissioned in 1993 for the cover of John Berendt’s runaway bestseller about the Jim Williams murder trials, “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.” The picture of “Little Wendy” made both it and Leigh famous, and the statue had to be removed to the Telfair Academy after the book was released. Hanging nearby is Stewart’s shadowy and moss-laden “Bonaventure, Savannah.” Both images are ethereal, capturing the peacefulness and haunted quality of the historic burial ground.
At the second-floor landing, two nearly identical images of an Estill, S.C., water tower, snapped 24 years apart, hang side by side. Stewart had been working on a project along the Savannah River when he stopped his car to shoot an old mill in the middle of town. As he walked down the street, he saw the tower framed by two silos and could not pass up getting the shot.
A few weeks later, he says he came across Leigh’s image of the same view for the first time. “It was just this great little sign of standing where he stood and not realizing it and having this little marker — I like to call them treasures,” said Stewart.
You can — and maybe should — go home again
Leigh, a Savannah native, fell in love with documentary photography his last quarter at the University of Georgia, where he had gone initially to study painting. He sought the guidance of other masters of the medium, George Tice and Eva Rubinstein among them. But Leigh did not find his solid footing until he turned his lens back toward the land to which he was “bound.”
“He was photographing everywhere except home,” said gallery owner Susan Laney, who served as general manager of Leigh’s eponymous gallery until it closed in 2007 and still oversees his archives. “He realized his best photographs were from here … because all of the subject matter and passing ways of life were close to the home he knew. And this place and its people were what inspired him.”
Stewart, a North Carolina native, came to study photography at the Savannah College of Art and Design, where he earned a BFA in 2015. He, too, left for a while.
“I was in Savannah but always looking outward … like in Death Valley, or I was going to Montana or Maine … I was just exploring a lot, experimenting a lot, trying to figure out my voice.”
The COVID-19 pandemic scuttled a trip to Iceland and narrowed Stewart’s focus on the grand landscapes right in his backyard — Ossabaw Island, Wassaw Sound, the Herb River. “I was like, all right, I’m going to dive in here now because I can, and I haven’t looked back since.”
His former professor Craig Stevens, who had been printing Leigh’s archival pigment prints for the estate, often spoke of Leigh, which prompted Stewart to explore his six photography books. Stewart met Laney in 2014 when she curated a retrospective of Leigh’s 30-plus years’ work documenting the coastal South’s lives and landscapes at the SCAD Museum of Art. After Stevens retired from SCAD and moved to Maine, Stewart opened his own studio in Savannah’s Starland neighborhood and began printing Leigh’s archival images for Laney.
That printing work served as an independent master class in Leigh’s approach to capturing the coastal South’s dappled light, dark beauty and ever-evolving shoreline. “I’m just imagining him in the dark room, making these prints, setting them aside. It gets you into the mind of the artist to kind of see what he saw. It’s a very special opportunity.”
Laney and Stewart co-curated the exhibit. It includes some of Leigh’s lesser-known works that showcase his keen eye for composition, such as one of Savannah’s hand-painted business signs and another of a homemade ping-pong table sitting on a sand floor in a Tybee Island beach house. Stewart’s style possesses an architectural quality, as in the garlanded portal of “Causeway, Isle of Hope” and storm-stripped trees on “Wassaw Island, 2026.”
If You Go
“Jack Leigh and Parker Stewart: In Place” at Laney Contemporary, 1810 Mills B Lane Blvd., Savannah, Ga., through Aug. 1. The gallery is open 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Friday, and 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., Saturday. For more information and details of a future artist talk, go to laneycontemporary.com.
