Representing the complexity of the South is a tall order. It’s an endeavor prone to cliches, some of which “Reckonings and Reconstructions: Southern Photography From the Do Good Fund” at the Georgia Museum of Art can’t avoid. Devotees of church hats, snake handlers, porch sitting, planted fields, domestic workers, abject poverty, sharecropper cabins, stately antebellum homes and leathery old timers will surely get their fill.
There are thus some expected Southernisms in “Reckonings and Reconstructions” divided into themes of Land, Labor, Law and Protest, Food, Ritual and Kinship.
The Do Good Fund is a repository of more than 600 images of the South from World War II until the present day. Housed in Columbus and founded by former chair of the Georgia Museum of Art’s board of advisors, attorney Alan F. Rothschild Jr., this particular iteration of the collection travels to the Chrysler Museum of Art, Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami and Iowa’s Figge Art Museum where I suspect it will render a vision of the region both titillating and strange. The works on view include icons of photography like Gordon Parks, Emmet Gowin, Ralph Eugene Meatyard and William Christenberry admirably mixed in with less burnished artists.
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One of the pleasures of the show is how many of the most arresting, stick-to-your-bones images are by Atlanta photographers. Jerry Siegel’s 2009 image “Homecoming, Selma, Alabama” of a blonde in white hoop skirt seen from behind, a totem standing on a football field and facing her audience, is a wonderfully withholding vision of idealized Southern femininity. Jill Frank’s viscerally close images of teenagers bristle with a similar visually seductive, incandescent energy. And it’s always rewarding to see work like the cinematic “Men in Car” by Athens photographer Carl Martin — the Jim Jarmusch of the South — who always manages to capture the region with a blend of romance and exoticism that never reduces it to mere curiosity.
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There are certainly images in “Reckonings and Reconstructions” that convey the timelessness of place in a way that feels true.
Dutch photographer Bertien van Manen’s ethereal, transportive “Amanda, Bobby, Magi on porch, Cumberland, KY,” of a young father cradling his tow-headed daughter and a rifle on his lap is a scene that could have taken place in 1947 or 1987. The image manages to play into one stereotype of Southern gun culture while subverting it with an evanescent glimpse of a tender moment between parent and child.
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The most satisfying portion of the show is the last, which seems to fall outside “Reckonings and Reconstructions” thematic boundaries. The exhibition’s final gallery captures in full-throated splendor the bizarre contradictions of the South. A young girl gently cuddles a chicken, a bewitching image from Texas-based Jennifer Garza-Cuen of a long-legged little girl with a resolute air holding a snake conveys the intimacy of children and nature. An idea is conveyed of the South as a place where nature is always close and respected. And yet, nearby images like one of putrid, gushing clouds in Jeff Rich’s “Blue Ridge Paper Mill” tell a different story. Sickening for its nonchalant brutality, Matt Eich’s “Double-Tap, Shell Island, Louisiana” of a man’s tattooed arm extended into the frame holding a gun and in the background, a bloody, dying alligator are brutal juxtapositions with that Edenic vantage. Eich’s photograph conveys in a single image the slippery Southern mindset where love of nature coexists with citizens who blithely look the other way when heavy industry pollutes its air, rivers and even its people.
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I’m not sure I learned anything new about the South in “Reckonings and Reconstructions” though passing time with such a varied array of photographers is never wasted effort. You can still feel the delights of gorging, even if you don’t feel especially nourished.
ART REVIEW
“Reckonings and Reconstructions: Southern Photography From the Do Good Fund”
Through Jan. 8. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays; 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Thursdays; 1-5 p.m. Sundays. Free. Georgia Museum of Art, 90 Carlton St., Athens. 706-542-4662, www.georgiamuseum.org.
Bottom line: A show dedicated to representing the South proves occasionally revealing but more often leaves you craving more.
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