New Southern Photography highlights the exciting and diverse breadth of photography being practiced in the American South today. The largest photography exhibition at the Ogden Museum to date, this exhibition will feature the work of twenty-five emerging, mid-career and established photographers. Each photographer included will be individually showcased with a monographic installation focusing on a single body of work within the context of a group exhibition. All types of lens-formed imagery will be included from traditional analogue and digital still photography to video installation and new media. New Southern Photography will debut at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in the fall of 2018, and is available for travel to other institutions through 2021.
New Southern Photography explores the role photography plays in formulating the visual iconography of the modern New South. Regional identity in an interconnected and global world is central to the exhibition’s narrative. Themes and ideas addressed in New Southern Photography include: memory, the experience of place in the American South, cultural mythology and reality, deep familial connections to the land, the tension between the past and present, and the transitory nature of change in the New South.
The goal of New Southern Photography is to create a space for conversation about the region. This exhibition will not only highlight recent contributions the American South has made to the world through photography, but also serve as a platform to broaden the understanding and appreciation of this complicated, contested, and often misunderstood region. New Southern Photography follows in the rich tradition of Southern literature, where storytelling is paramount.
It could be said that photography has been the American South’s greatest contribution to 20th century art. Southern photographers – William Christenberry, Sally Mann, and William Eggleston – are international art superstars who pioneered the “Southernization” of the contemporary global photographic aesthetic. Following the trajectory of Christenberry, Eggleston and Mann, New Southern Photography looks at the photographic innovators of today who are influencing the visualization of the American South to a global audience.
Work represented in the exhibition will be from the past ten years. Photographers included in the New Southern Photography exhibition are: David Emitt Adams, Kael Alford, Elizabeth Bick, Christa Blackwood, John Chiara, Scott Dalton, Joshua Gibson, Maury Gortemiller, Alex Grabiec, Aaron Hardin, Courtney Johnson, Tommy Kha, Brittany Lauback, Carl Martin, Jonathan Traviesa & Cristina Molina, Andrew Moore, Celestia Morgan, Nancy Newberry, RaMell Ross, Whitten Sabbatini, Jared Soares, Louviere + Vanessa, and Susan Worsham.
New Southern Photography is being curated by Richard McCabe, Ogden Museum of Southern Art’s Curator of Photography.