Art curator Jeffrey Richmond-Moll writes about the Do Good Fund’s 10-year-anniversary exhibition, “Reckonings and Reconstructions,” featuring 125 photographs by 73 artists.
Essay by Jeffrey Richmond-Moll | Photos courtesy of the Do Good Fund
(Header Image) Peyton Fulford, “Becoming One (Annie and Trevor),” 2016. Archival pigment print, 19 × 23 1/4 inches.
October 18, 2022
In the South, I’ve come to learn, you look backward to see forward. The photographs in the collection of the Do Good Fund are similarly Janus-faced. A visual narrative of the ever-changing American South, these pictures mark out traces of history within the present. Or they yearn for another future, a way forward from a sometimes despairing or disappearing past.
To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Do Good Fund’s founding, the Georgia Museum of Art organized “Reckonings and Reconstructions,” the first large-scale survey exhibition and book about the fund’s collection of Southern photography. As the fund continues to collect and support working and emerging photographers, “Reckonings and Reconstructions” represents a snapshot in time, featuring 125 photographs by 73 artists diverse in gender, race, ethnicity, and region.
These images tease apart the tangled cultural memory of the American South. As photographer RaMell Ross writes in the catalog for the show, to be a picture of the region is “to be Southern like the South’s time, part ghost, part momentum.” Yet out of this divided sense of time and existence, we also see the possibility that a Southern photograph can hold: in Ross’ words, “to be liberated, having known death.”
Pamela Pecchio, “Mitchell’s Arm,” 1997. Fiber pigment print, 11 × 16 inches.
The photographs in this show are reckonings. They contend with the past, they tally up and give an account, they surmise, and they assert that change must come. As a project originating in the birthplace of R.E.M. — and at the hometown museum of a prolific community of photographers, including Michael Stipe, Carl Martin, and Mark Steinmetz, not to mention the university that trained Stipe, Georgia Rhodes, Pamela Pecchio, and many others — the word “reckonings” seemed fitting. Rachel Boillot’s photograph of “the yellowest post office in Mississippi” shows a dignified Ida, seated with a red hoe in hand. Although the tool she holds may nod to dark histories of enslaved plantation labor in the South, here she is at rest, her head radiantly haloed by glowing light, the mistress of her own domain.
Mark Steinmetz, “Athens, GA,” 1996. Gelatin silver print, 16 × 20 inches.
Carl Martin, “Men in Car,” 1996-98. Printed: 2018 (from “Public Gesture” series) Edition: 1/15, Archival pigment print, 19 1/2 × 19 1/2 inches.
These photographs are also reconstructions. They note the failed efforts of reconstructing this region throughout U.S. history, they mount a renewed campaign of restoration and repair, and they imagine a world as it ought to be. Matt Eich’s “Firehose Baptism” shows the boisterous fanfare and thick mist of a United House of Prayer event in Newport News, Virginia. As open hydrants rain down on the crowd, we ought not lose sight of the radical implications of the water’s source. The firehose — the infamous instrument of suppression during the Civil Rights Movement — is refashioned into a means of redemption and transcendence. In glimmering moments, these photographers lay bare resilient bonds of community, bold acts of joy, and moments of breathless exuberance.
Together these pictures also challenge common assumptions about Southernness. While some images present a South seemingly frozen in time, others show another, perhaps unexpected, South. Jennifer Garza-Cuen captures a young girl standing in the road deep in a forest, a snake wriggling around one arm. It’s an image that plays on the stereotypes of Southern otherness: charismatic serpent handlers, primitive woods people. But in her youthful innocence and unwavering pose, she steadfastly offers another way of being in and with nature — of being reconciled and brought back to Eden, before the mythic curse that pitted woman and serpent against each other. Seen together, as essayist W. Ralph Eubanks observes in the catalog, these photographs collapse the mythic, the historical, the familiar, the bewildering, and the rapidly shifting U.S. South.
Caitlin Peterson, “Tallulah Gorge,” 2013. Edition: 1/8, Digital C-print, 23 1/2 × 29 1/2 inches.
Georgia Rhodes, “Roadtrip,” 2014. Archival inkjet print on Canson Platine Fibre rag paper, 16 × 29 inches.
As a result, “Reckonings and Reconstructions” approaches the South as an open-ended question. It probes the realities and mythologies of the region across six themes: land, labor, law and protest, food, ritual, and kinship. Each theme also inspired the chorus of voices that appear in the accompanying book. There we see poetic ruminations by Eubanks, Ross, and Lauren Henkin, alongside speculations on photographic possibility by historian Grace Elizabeth Hale. And there we also find photographer Jeff Whetstone recasting the South as the “Plant Hardiness Zone,” journalist Rosalind Bentley meditating on abundance and lack in Southern foodways, and critic Jasmine Amussen on photographs that capture “the nations women were building with their labor.”
Amussen’s words ring loudly, too, in photographs like Jeff Rich’s “Blue Ridge Paper Mill.” “Labor, extraction, rare-earth elements — all of the worst things about the capitalist exploitation of people are on bald display in the South. … If nobody lives here, works here, does anyone have to live with the consequences?” While pictures like Caitlin Peterson’s “Tallulah Gorge” show a landscape replaced by its facsimile, a place that keeps the natural world at arm’s length, Georgia Rhodes’ “Roadtrip” brings nature crashing through the hermetic seal of a car window. Our most modern conveyance, which carries us across, through, and around nature, is suddenly bursting with goldenrod. Here, and in Susan Worsham’s still life of rhubarb and plums, where sweet fruits and flamboyant flowers play on our desires, we also might join Whetstone in seeing “the South as a place that plants made.” And by seeing the South as a place where our desires and the desires of plants converge, Whetstone concludes, “We can come closer to understanding how we can love a place that hurts us.” This is what it feels like, in short, “to be owned by the land.”
Carolyn Drake, “Mexican Grocery, Albertville, Alabama,” 2013. Edition: 1/5, Archival pigment print, 20 × 30 inches.
Susan Worsham, “Margaret’s Rhubarb,” 2010. Archival pigment print, 20 × 25 inches.
Jeff Rich, “Blue Ridge Paper Mill, The Pigeon River, Canton, North Carolina,” 2008. Archival inkjet print, 28 × 35 inches.
Sheila Pree Bright’s “#1960Now” series suggests how photographs have intervened in both legal structures and acts of resistance, from the Civil Rights era to Black Lives Matter. Her portrait of a weeping protester at an Atlanta march in 2016 conveys the burdens of such resistance as well as the weight of reclamation and renewal on those who seek to make new histories and build new communities. Meanwhile, Peyton Fulford’s tangled bodies suggest how a medium that has long signaled exclusion can also forge relationships and belonging. In “Becoming One,” as in other portraits from Fulford’s series, the two entwined figures assert unity in alternative relational structures, which resist separation of “kin” by race, blood relation, or other entrenched markers of identity.
Sheila Pree Bright, “#SayHerName (Young Man Crying),” from “#1960Now” series, 2016. Archival pigment print, 30 × 30 inches.
Matt Eich, “Firehose Baptism, Newport News, Virginia” (from the series “The Invisible Yoke, Volume III: The Seven Cities”), 2013. Archival pigment print, 16 × 24 inches.
Across all of these pictures, “Southern photography” is a term held loosely — a porous category that has evolved over generations and across the popular imagination. For that matter, the Do Good’s collection also inspires us to see connections between the southern United States and other parts of the country that lie beyond archaic, artificial borders like the Mason-Dixon Line. After all, what we often mean by the “South” is a shared sensibility rather than a consistent culture rooted in a specific geography. Pictures like Carolyn Drake’s “Mexican Grocery” map complex patterns of migration in the long history of the South, from the African diaspora across the Middle Passage to the industries dependent on Central and South American labor and beyond. Drake also shows the divine breaking forth in the mundane space of a supermarket, the flowering vines and floating dove surrounding images of Christ and the Virgin. With these ornaments, we understand the power of ritual to forge and sustain ancestral identity even amid geopolitical displacement. And the South is nothing if not a place where rituals — civic or religious — have been crucial to performing and maintaining communal identity.
Rachel Boillot, “Postmistress Ida, Sherard, MS,” 2013. Chromogenic print, 19 1/2 × 24 1/4 inches.
Jennifer Garza-Cuen, “Untitled — Girl With Snake,” 2016. Edition 3/10, Archival pigment print, 20 × 25 inches.
On a warming planet of unseasonable weather and shifting migration patterns, the South is constantly encroaching on the North. As those boundaries continue to dissolve, these photographs might also help remind us of the complicity throughout U.S. history of Northern politicians and entrepreneurs in purportedly “Southern” problems like chattel slavery. What rings ever more clearly at this moment in our nation’s history is that we cannot understand the present realities and identities of the American South — whether legacies of racial injustice, the indelible marks of the Confederacy on the built environment and across our social fabric, or the impact of ecological recklessness — without a thorough grounding in the region’s past, including its photographic traditions.
“Reckonings and Reconstructions” presents the enigmatic, ever-changing qualities of the South and its people — a place where despair and hope, terror and beauty, pain and joy, and indignity and dignity coexist and commingle. The photographs show a region seeking reconciliation and restoration, captured by photographers who share the ethical vision of this collection: to use the camera as an instrument to Do Good. ◊
Jeffrey Richmond-Moll is curator of American art at the Georgia Museum of Art, located on the campus of the University of Georgia. A graduate of Princeton University and the University of Delaware, he has written on topics ranging from American still-life painting to modernism in the Southwest. He is editor and lead author of Extra Ordinary: Magic, Mystery, and Imagination in American Realism(2021), which won the SECAC Award for Curatorial Excellence, and Reckonings and Reconstructions: Southern Photography From the Do Good Fund (2022).
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