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Southern Testaments
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or more than a century, photographers have documented the American South in its pleasantries, unrest, and eccentricities, many times with a focus on the people of a region where romantic traditions prevail. The Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art opens a new window on the South with a collection that merges this past with present in the exhibition Southbound: Photographs of and about the New South, which is also showing at the City Gallery at Waterfront Park in Charleston. Fifty-six photographers contributed to this, the largest exhibition of photographs of the American South in the twenty-first century, on display until March 2. Many of the artists are Southerners by birth, others with ties by family, or some with a prevailing curiosity of place that led them to travel unknown paths of kudzu fields, trailer parks, churches, prisons, protests, rivers, beaches, oil spills, and battlegrounds. Co-curators Mark Sloan and Mark Long write, “Southbound is one slice of a New South in transition, sufficiently complex to capture something essential about the region in the early twenty-first century.”
Photographs courtesy of the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston
The Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art presents a powerhouse view of Southern culture / by Polly Gaillard Renowned art photographers from New York, Seattle, Hong Kong, and San Francisco display photographs that hang beside images created by Southern natives from small towns in states like Kentucky and Tennessee. Artists’ biographies include Yale graduates, Guggenheim fellows, a Life Magazine contributor, a professor at Princeton, a self-taught photographer from Greenville, Mississippi, and a couple hailing from New Orleans’ Ninth Ward. The diversity of the contributing photographers blends into a compelling view of a new South seen through many different vantage points—a place where transition has become the new tradition. Southbound combines mixed-media images, classic black-andwhite photographs, wet collodion processes, and contemporary, vibrant color imagery made with a mix of cameras from large-format to state-of-the-art DSLRs. The exhibit frames racially charged issues in an image of African-American police officers in riot gear braced for action at a White Power March by Sheila Pree Bright, and Gillian Laub’s picture of Julie and Bubba, an interracial couple in Mount
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