Alex Harris
Alex Harris (b. 1949) is an educator, writer, curator, and documentary photographer living in Durham, NC. During his undergraduate tenure at Yale, he worked closely with mentor Walker Evans. Throughout his career, Harris has photographed extensively in the American South, New Mexico, Alaska, and Cuba. His work is represented in major collections including The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles); the Museum of Modern Art (New York); the High Museum of Art (Atlanta); the North Carolina Museum of Art (Raleigh, NC); and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York). Harris has been recognized for his work with honors such as a Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography, a Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellowship, and a Lyndhurst Prize. His photographs have been exhibited in numerous museums including shows at the International Center of Photography (New York); the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles); the High Museum of Art (Atlanta); the Mobile Museum of Art (Mobile, AL); the Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno (Valencia, Spain); the Museum of Fine Arts Santa Fe; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, to name just a handful. As a photographer and editor, Harris has published eighteen books, including River of Traps, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the Evans Biography Award in 1990.
In 1980, Harris founded the Center for Documentary Photography at Duke University, which he directed for eight years. In 1989, he was a founder of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke. Harris currently serves as a Professor of the Practice of Public Policy and Documentary Studies at Duke. Within the Center for Documentary Studies, he is the Creative Director of the Lewis Hine Documentary Fellows Program.