Georgia Rhodes (b. 1988), “Roadtrip,” 2014. Archival inkjet print on Canson Platine Fibre rag paper, 16 × 29 inches. The Do Good Fund, Inc., 2016–45. © Georgia Rhodes. Peyton Fulford (b. 1994), “Becoming One (Annie and Trevor),” 2016. Archival pigment print, 19 × 23 1/4 inches. The Do Good Fund, Inc., 2017–138. Alex Harris (b. 1949), “Transylvania County, North Carolina,” 1972. Archival pigment print, 16 1/2 × 24 inches. The Do Good Fund, Inc., 2017–23. © Alex Harris.
Since its founding in 2012, the Do Good Fund has built a mu- seum-quality collection of photography that charts a visual narrative of the ever-changing American South. The collec- tion includes images by more than 25 Guggenheim Fellows, five Magnum Photographers and two Henri Cartier-Bresson Award winners as well as images by lesser-known or emerg- ing photographers from the region. In part a survey of the art and artists within Do Good’s holdings, the exhibition is also and more crucially a scholarly investigation of southern photography since World War II. Highlighting a wide-ranging group of photographers — di- verse in gender, race, ethnicity and region — the exhibition will feature 125 photographs by 73 artists. It unfolds within six sections that examine each of the project’s core themes: land, labor, law and protest, food, ritual and kinship. These themes are inherently expansive and internally paradox- ical. Within this thematic structure, the project raises key questions that identify and problematize fixed ideas of an “American South” and “southern photography.” How do pho- tographs navigate the interface between nature and culture in the South, as well as the ravages of extraction, settlement and sprawl? How do photographers string together histories of quotidian labor, creativity and caretaking and the region’s painful histories of enslaved and incarcerated labor? How have photographs captured the performance of southern community and identity through civic and religious rituals? How has the medium signaled exclusion and estrangement, yet also belonging and kinship in the American South? These six themes link disparate works in the fund’s collec- tion and capture southern history, culture and identity in all their complexity and contradictions. Through the instal- lation, where clusters of objects variously construct and deconstruct each thematic category, the exhibition reckons with southern-ness as a coherent category. In so doing, it re- sists notions of the South as a retrograde region and instead presents the enigmatic, “ever-changing” qualities of the place and its people: a region where despair and hope, terror and beauty, pain and joy, and indignity and dignity commin- gle; a place seeking reconciliation and restoration, captured by photographers with an ethical vision for a “Better South.” “Reckonings and Reconstructions” will be accompanied by the first comprehensive catalogue of the Do Good Fund’s photographic holdings, co-published with the University of Georgia Press. The project will also consider the role of Ath- ens, Georgia — with its vibrant community of photographers, renowned photography program at the University of Georgia and celebrated alternative art and music scene — within the history of southern photography. The exhibition will also travel to the Chrysler Museum of Art, August 11, 2023 – January 7, 2024; the Lowe Art Muse- um, University of Miami, February 8 – May 18, 2024; and the Figge Art Museum, June 15 – September 8, 2024.
Curator: Jeffrey Richmond-Moll, curator of American art Sponsors: The Wyeth Foundation for American Art, the Furthermore Foundation, the Bradley Hale Fund for Southern Studies at the University of Georgia Press, the W. Newton Morris Charitable Foundation Fund and the Friends of the Georgia Museum of Art
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