Alex Harris (b. 1949) was raised in the South and lives in Durham, North Carolina with his wife, Margaret Sartor, and their two children. 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 in Los Angeles, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The High Museum of Art in Atlanta, The North Carolina Museum of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography, a Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellowship, and a Lyndhurst Prize. His photographs have been exhibited in numerous museums including two solo exhibitions at the International Center of Photography in New York. As a photographer and editor, Harris has published fourteen books including River of Traps (with William deBuys) a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in general non-fiction. His next book, The Idea of Cuba, will be co-published in July of 2007 by the University of New Mexico Press and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke.
Harris was born in Atlanta, Georgia and grew up in the South. After graduation from Yale in 1971, he photographed North Carolina as part of a Duke University research project. Between 1972 and 1978 he lived and photographed in Hispanic villages in northern New Mexico and Eskimo villages in Alaska. During these years, Harris also began to commute to North Carolina to teach documentary photography at Duke. In 1980 he founded the Center for Documentary Photography at Duke, which he directed for eight years. In 1989, he was a founder of The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke. Between 1995 and 1998 Harris launched DoubleTake Magazine with Robert Coles and coedited the publication through its first twelve issues. He is currently 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.
Alex Harris: Photographs, 1998-2000 | Images from the Duke University Special Collections Library
Alex Harris, Hart Leadership Program