Review: The South’s truth and reality blur in High Museum’s ‘A Long Arc’ exhibit

A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845, on view at the High Museum of Art through January 14, moves in and out of the complications of the American South and, more overtly, the complications within the medium of photography.

Photography requires us to untangle truth and reality, the fabricated and found, meaning and meaningless. And a photography exhibition which is presented as the most comprehensive retrospective of Southern photography since 1845 — as this one is — invites the audience to see for the first time images from the beginning of the medium to the present day, dispelling the collective Southern myth. It asks us to look again.

For the photography historian as well as the casual art lover, this expansive exhibition features rarely seen processes and iconic images alongside more impactful photographs revealing accounts of life in the Southern states.

For those interested in documentation, Doris Derby’s candid photographs of grassroots organizers during the Civil Rights movement highlight how deeply connected social change and artists are. And for viewers desiring to see exquisite photographic works that complicate the often storied images of the South, there are incredible gems from photographers whom we would not expect to make images of the South. James Van Der Zee, for instance, a famous portrait photographer documented segregated schools in Virginia, and Diane Arbus, known for her intimate portraits, created a compassionate image of Mrs. Martin Luther King Jr., on Her Front Lawn, Atlanta, Ga. (1968).

Curating A Long Arc was a many year and several curator endeavor, expanding into well over 200 single images, most from the High Museum’s growing collection.

A notable shift in the medium of photography happens with the advent of color film; we see this in the section titled Returns and Renewals, spanning 1970 to 2000.

William Eggleston, who photographed primarily in Mississippi, helped launch color film photography as a fine art medium and along with it a distinct turn of the lens expressing interior and personal lives rather than social scapes.

Then there are images like Ron Jude’s Back #294, Atlanta (1993), shot from a lower level up to the shoulder of a man in a business suit with the anonymous downtown Atlanta architecture looming, and Untitled (father and baby), (1985) by Oraien Catledge, showing a young man in Cabbagetown holding an infant. His gentle gaze and the outstretched arm of the infant reveal both the terror and pride of parenthood.

In these images we begin to see a departure from the collective: They confront the myth of the South and demand to be seen individually, without denying that the individual can be as complicated, as proud and as real as the collective.

Concluding the exhibition is the section A New South, Again (2000-now), featuring nearly a quarter decade of contemporary works. This section is a testament to the focus of curator Gregory Harris, who has an unmatched enthusiasm for the distinct work coming from the South today.

Rahim Fortune’s  Line Me Up, Kyle, Texas, (2020), a gelatin silver print of the artist getting a haircut, has an almost spiritual light leak which veils the subject’s gaze. Another blurring comes from Alex Harris’ Picturing the South commission, Thunder Road, Austin, Texas (2017), in which the artist photographed film productions depicting the South. Harris, like Fortune, shows us how easily storytelling and life can become tangled together. In this new era of Southern artists, that is precisely the point.

A Long Arc is a compelling combination of a strategic museum collection of historical photography and contemporary work, with an emphasis on the latter. The last gallery of the exhibition combines artists like Irina Rozovsky, Jill Frank, Carolyn Drake and José Ibarra Rizo. Each of them reveals the tender and personal from which the universally human emerges.

A Long Arc is a traveling exhibit — the next stop is Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts — opening March 2024.

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Stephanie Dowda DeMer (she/her) is a lens-based artist and writer based in Atlanta.