New Southern Photography

Susan Worsham, Marine, Hotel near airport, Richmond, VA, 2009, Archival pigment print, Gift of the artist

On View October 6, 2018 – March 10, 2019

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Contributing Sponsors
Ella West Freeman Foundation
RosaMary Foundation

Supporting Sponsors
Alexa Georges & Jerry Armatis
B. Benjamin Lowry & Shelly Gallender

Host Committee
Tracy Copeland
Mollye & Laurent Demosthenidy
Jessie & Beau Haynes
Jan W. Katz & Jim Derbes
Sarah McMillan & Jason MacFetters
Lola & Don Norris
Roger Ogden & Ken Barnes
Southern Humanities Fund

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New Southern Photography highlights the exciting and diverse breadth of photography being practiced in the American South today. The largest photography exhibition at the Ogden Museum to date, this exhibition features the work of 25 emerging, mid-career and established photographers. Each photographer is individually showcased with a monographic installation focusing on a single body of work within the context of a group exhibition. All types of lens-formed imagery are included from traditional analogue and digital still photography to video installation and new media. New Southern Photography is available for travel to other institutions through 2021.

New Southern Photography explores the role photography plays in formulating the visual iconography of the modern New South. Regional identity in an interconnected and global world is central to the exhibition’s narrative. Themes and ideas addressed in New Southern Photography include: memory, the experience of place in the American South, cultural mythology and reality, deep familial connections to the land, the tension between the past and present, and the transitory nature of change in the New South.

The goal of New Southern Photography is to create a space for conversation about the region. This exhibition not only highlights recent contributions the American South has made to the world through photography, but serves as a platform to broaden the understanding and appreciation of this complicated, contested and often misunderstood region. New Southern Photography follows in the rich tradition of Southern literature, where storytelling is paramount.

It could be said that photography has been the American South’s greatest contribution to 20^th century art. Southern photographers – William Christenberry, Sally Mann and William Eggleston – are international art superstars who pioneered the “Southernization” of the contemporary global photographic aesthetic. Following the trajectory of Christenberry, Eggleston and Mann, New Southern Photography looks at the photographic innovators of today who are influencing the visualization of the American South to a global audience.

Work represented in the exhibition is from the past 10 years. Photographers included in the New Southern Photography exhibition are: David Emitt Adams, Kael Alford, Elizabeth Bick, Christa Blackwood, John Chiara, Scott Dalton, Joshua Gibson, Maury Gortemiller, Alex Grabiec, Aaron Hardin, Courtney Johnson, Tommy Kha, Brittany Lauback, Carl Martin, Jonathan Traviesa & Cristina Molina, Andrew Moore, Celestia Morgan, Nancy Newberry, RaMell Ross, Whitten Sabbatini, Jared Soares, Louviere + Vanessa and Susan Worsham.

New Southern Photography is curated by Richard McCabe, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art’s Curator of Photography.