Narrative Film Sets in the American South
A glimpse of life in the American South with all its complexities. (Art Net News)
Commissioned by the High Museum in Atlanta as part of its Picturing the South series, photographer Alex Harris chose to examine the rapidly evolving world of independent fiction filmmaking while also exploring our increasingly visual culture. Made on over 40 film sets throughout the region, his photographs reveal a new generation of filmmakers coming to terms with matters of race, class, and sexuality that relate not just to the South but to the whole country. Harris’ photographs also hint at more universal aspects of life – the ways in which we are all actors in our own lives, creating our sets, practicing our lines, refining our characters, playing ourselves.
Blurring the lines between documentary and fiction, Alex Harris and Margaret Sartor have created this immersive photobook, using still photographs to evoke their own cinematic-like narrative. Our Strange New Land is a portrait of the American South that is at once familiar and surprising, delightful and frightening, sobering and beautiful.
As Charles Bethea wrote about one photograph from this book for the New Yorker, “Harris’s photograph bring(s) to mind the especially painful intertwined histories of race and law enforcement in the South. Yet the scene is a doubly staged moment of conflict—a picture of another picture being made in a region, and a country, that has not yet been able to fully make sense of, or prevent, scenes of the real thing.”
Photographs by Alex Harris Edited by Alex Harris and Margaret Sartor Essay by Roni Nicole Henderson-Day
