The South: Then & Now
According to Kinder, “The South: Then and Now,” features over 90 photographs between the art council’s gallery and the W’s galleries.
Imes selected the images from over 700 available at the Do Good Fund. The Columbus, Georgia, public charity collects and lends photographs by a range of photographers from Guggenheim Fellows to emerging artists.
The CAC exhibit will feature groupings of several works by the same photographer. Photographs range from after World War II to around 2000 at the arts council, while more current works appear at the W, Kinder said.
“Having the opportunity to curate these two shows from the Do Good Fund, a superlative collection of more than 700 carefully chosen photographs of the South, was akin to giving a child the keys to a toy store. That is to say, it was great fun,” Imes said.
After figuring out how to create two distinct shows from the works of more than 100 photographers, Imes said he settled on the idea of time as conveyed by the photographs’ subject matter.
“I divided the photographs into the agrarian, historical South and the more urban, modern-day South,” he said. “The images of the ‘Then’ exhibit (at the Rosenzweig Arts Center), are generally documentary in nature and depict such as the African American rural South, the Appalachian South or the Old South with its fading plantation culture.
“By contrast the work of the photographers represented in the “Now” group (at MUW’s Summer Gallery) grapples with issues of race, gender identity and the environment. They, too, for the most part, take a documentary approach.”
Imes said he chose pictures he thought would best challenge, inform and take the viewer to places he or she might not have been.
“The celebrated Memphis photographer William Eggleston (a transplanted Mississippian) once famously told an interviewer that he was ‘at war with the obvious,’” he said. “Little in these two exhibits is obvious. Rather I think they offer a compelling, passionate, yet nuanced view of the South and its many complexities. I hope you, the viewer, will concur.”