Southbound.

Photographs of and about the New South.

Edited with introduction by Mark Sloan and Mark Long. Contributions by Nikky Finney, Eleanor Heartney, William Ferris, John T. Edge, and Rick Bunch.

Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, USA, 2018. English, 384 pp., 300, 11x12".

Reviewed by Karen Jenkins on photo-eye Blog.

Southbound comprises fifty-six photographers’ visions of the South over the first decades of the twenty-first century. Accordingly, it offers a composite image of the region. The photographs echo stories told about the South through Americanization and globalization, and as a land full of surprising realities. The project’s purpose is to investigate the senses of place in the South that congeal, however fleetingly, in the spaces between the photographers’ looking, their images, and our preexisting ideas about the region.

Recognizing the complexity of understanding any place, let alone one as charged as the American South, the curators’ approach is transdisciplinary. Southbound embraces the conundrum of its name. To be southbound is to journey to a place in flux, radically transformed over recent decades, yet also insistently in the United States. To be southbound is also to confront the weight of preconceived notions about this place, thick with stereotypes, encoded in the artistic, literary, and media records. Southbound engages with and unsettles assumed narratives about this contested region by providing fresh perspectives for understanding the complex admixture of history, geography, and culture that constitutes today’s New South.

The history of the American South is among the most storied of any region in the world. As a result of the vitality of its culture and the diversity of its inhabitants – to say nothing about the salience of photography in the United States – the region has also come to be among the most photographed. Southbound charts new courses toward expanded imaginings for the twenty-first century South.

FEATURED ARTISTS
Shelby Lee Adams, Rob Amberg, Daniel Beltrá, Rachel Boillot, Sheila Pree Bright, Lucinda Bunnen, Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick, Langdon Clay, Maude Schuyler Clay, Thomas Daniel, Eliot Dudik, Matt Eich, Lisa Elmaleh, Mitch Epstein, McNair Evans, Lucas Foglia, Kyle Ford, Preston Gannaway, Alex Harris, John Lusk Hathaway, Titus Brooks Heagins, Lauren Henkin, Timothy Hursley, Jessica Ingram, Will Jacks, Daniel Kariko, Tommy Kha, Kevin Kline, Stacy Kranitz, Gillian Laub, Deborah Luster, Tammy Mercure, Jeanine Michna-Bales, Greg Miller, Susana Raab, Tom Rankin, Tamara Reynolds, Jeff Rich, Eugene Richards, Kathleen Robbins, Euphus Ruth, Anderson Scott, Jerry Siegel, David Simonton, Christopher Sims, Mike Smith, Magdalena Solé, Bill Steber, Mark Steinmetz, Brandon Thibodeaux, Burk Uzzle, Sofia Valiente, Michelle Van Parys, Jeff Whetstone, Susan Worsham

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