ART FILM
The Beauty Beneath the Beauty How Alex Harris’s ‘Picturing the South’ photo exhibit will make you see movies in a different light By Mi chae l J . Pa l l e r i no
“And the People Could Fly”
“The Funeral Band”
“Doodle”
Photos courtesy Alex Harris
A s Benecio del Toro walked onto director Steven Soderbergh’s movie set, Alex Harris noticed something he admittedly never expected. Dressed in character as Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the Argentine Marxist revolutionary leader who would play a vital role in the Cuban Revolution, del Toro’s presence was transcendent. For the actors, extras, and townspeople of Campeche, Mexico, it was as if Che himself was present. The scene stuck with Harris, who in 2017 had been invited by producer Laura Bickford to photograph Soderbergh’s take on the revolution’s climatic battle. At the time, the North Carolina award-winning photographer did not imagine the experience would be fundamentally different than his time photographing in Cuba, where he eventually published the book, The Idea of Cuba. But what Harris saw moved him. Mexican extras, hired to film the iconic struggle between Che and Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar’s troops, were passionately engrossed in the moment, as if the battle was real, Harris recalls. There was something else. Harris realized that he had unprecedented and intimate access while on set, which enabled him to capture emotionally charged moments amid the visually compelling people and settings he encountered. And if he missed a shot, there was almost always another take, from a different distance or angle. “It was a photographer’s dream,” Harris admits. “I had hoped my work would walk the line between reality and fantasy, between the way we live in the South and the way southern narrative filmmakers portray our lives. I wanted it to be difficult to tell if my photographs were about a moment in real life or a movie set moment.”
says. “With filmmakers in the South, I was able to be part of a cast and crew, working in coordination with creative and talented individuals, some with years of experience, others on their first film project. This body of work is an act of faith in myself as a photographer to discover something in my pictures I didn’t already know or feel about the South, something I wasn’t already looking for.” Harris says that by repeatedly turning his camera on a particular subject; in this case, the making of contemporary southern narrative films; he could capture the big picture about life in this region. “Our idea of the South has been formed largely by our greatest storytellers. I began this project believing that by photographing on the sets of numerous contemporary southern filmmakers, I might show the South in a new light.” If you visit the exhibition, come without expectations. Harris says he was not trying to convey any single message, but simply the takes from a man with a camera photographing southern dramas in the same way he might approach a more traditional documentary project. “I followed my own instincts, and later edited my work not to tell a particular story, but to discover the stories my photographs have to tell,” Harris says. His work is one museum organizers are eager for patrons to see. Greg Harris, associate curator of photography at the High Museum, says Harris’s work is on par with Shakespeare’s the “world is a stage” mentality. “He turned his lenses on what was happening, when it was happening in the periphery of a movie set. Each photo depicts a certain mood and feeling that took place — the roles people took on and the characters they played.”
I began this project believing that by photographing on the sets of numerous
In the two years that followed, Harris visited 41 movie sets all over the south, resulting in another exhibit of the High Museum of Arts’ Picturing the South series. Established in 1996, Picturing the South is a distinctive High initiative that showcases noted photographers’ work on the American South. Harris’s Our Strange New Land: Photographs by Alex Harris exhibition, which runs through May 3, 2020, features 60 of Harris’s prints. For a more intimate take, Harris is presenting Make Believe: Walking the Line Between Documentary and Fiction. Scheduled for Feb. 8, 2020, from 2 p.m.-3 p.m. in the Hill Auditorium, the multi-media presentation includes more than 200 of Harris’s photographs on three separate screens. “For most of my working life, I have been, by choice and necessity, a loner working independently with individuals and communities around the world,” Harris contemporary southern filmmakers, I might show the South in a new light.
high.org/exhibition/our-strange-new-land-photographs-by-alex-harris
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