Southern photography has been getting a lot of attention lately, but how do you even define it? The exhibition “Reckonings and Reconstructions: Southern Photography from the Do Good Fund,” now on view at the museum through January 8, tries to do just that. Since its founding in Columbus, Georgia, in 2012, the Do Good Fund has built a museum-quality collection of photography that charts a visual narrative of the ever-changing American South.
This exhibition is the first large-scale survey of its collection. It features 125 photographs by 73 artists, several of whom are UGA alums, diverse in gender, race, ethnicity and region. Six sections examine core themes: land, labor, law and protest, food, ritual and kinship. Each theme raises as many questions as it answers. Together they link disparate works and capture southern history, culture and identity in all their complexity and contradictions. What is the South? It’s ever changing, a region where despair and hope, terror and beauty, pain and joy, and indignity and dignity commingle; a place seeking reconciliation and restoration, captured by these photographers.
The exhibition will travel to the Chrysler Museum of Art, the Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami and the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa. It is also accompanied by the first comprehensive catalogue of the Do Good Fund’s photographic holdings, co-published by the museum and the University of Georgia Press. A weekend of associated events, including a free symposium, takes place October 21 and 22. Visit the museum’s website at georgiamuseum.org for more information.