Coming to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts: A Long Arc: Photography and the American South Since 1845

09.2024

A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845, the first major exhibition of Southern photography in more than 25 years, will be on display at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts from October 5 through January 26, 2025.

This exhibit spans ,more than 175 years of photography from a broad swath of the American South — from Maryland to Florida, from Arkansas to Texas, and places in between. Visitors  will encounter everyday lives and ordinary places captured in evocative photos that contemplate the region’s central role in shaping American history and identity. The exhibition also examines the South’s critical impact on the development of photography.

“The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts is excited to present A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845, an astounding exhibition of powerful images of our shared Southern — and American — history by many of this country’s foremost photographers,” said the museum’s Director and CEO Alex Nyerges. “The exhibition also includes a number of captivating images of Richmond and the Commonwealth from the museum’s ever-growing collection of photographs.”

A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845 was organized by the High Museum of Art (Atlanta, Georgia); and co-curated by Gregory Harris, the Donald and Marilyn Keough Family curator of photography at the High Museum of Art; and Dr. Sarah Kennel, the Aaron Siskind curator of photography and director of the Raysor Center for Works on Paper at VMFA.

“A Long Arc reckons with the region’s fraught history, American identity and culture at large, asking us to consider the history of American photography with the South as its focal point,” said Dr. Kennel. “The exhibition examines the ways that photographers from the 19th century to the present have articulated the distinct and evolving character of the South’s people, landscape and culture.”

More than 180 works of historical and contemporary photography are featured in A Long Arc, which includes many from VMFA’s permanent collection.

Organized chronologically, A Long Arc opens with an exploration of the years from 1845 to 1865, where visitors will encounter compelling photographs made before and during the American Civil War. Photographers of this time, including Alexander Gardner and George Barnard, transformed the practice of the medium and established visual codes for articulating national identity and expressing collective trauma. Following the war, photographs made from 1865 to 1930 reveal the South’s incomplete project of Reconstruction, including new industries, a rise of community-based photography studios, the erection of white supremacist monuments, and scenes conveying social division.

With the emergence of documentary photography in the 1930s, photographs made in the South raised national consciousness around social and racial inequities. During this time, Farm Security Administration photographers working in the region, including Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and Marion Post Wolcott, defined a kind of documentary approach that dominated American photography for decades and recast a Southern vernacular into a new kind of national style.

During the 25 years following World War II, from 1945 to 1970, photography in the South was characterized by an incongruence between America’s optimistic image of itself and the enduring shadow of Jim Crow-era segregation. Artists like Robert Frank, Clarence John Laughlin and Ralph Eugene Meatyard made jarring and unsettling photographs that revealed economic, racial and psychic dissonance at odds with conventional images of American prosperity, while photographs of the civil rights movements by Bruce Davidson, Danny Lyon, Doris Derby and James Karales galvanized and shocked the nation with raw depictions of violence and the struggle for justice.

Photography in the South exhibits a sense of reflection, return and renewal in the three decades following the tumult of the 1960s, as artists like Sally Mann, William Eggleston and William Christenberry created narrative, self-reflexive bodies of work that simultaneously sustained and interrogated the South’s brutal histories and enduring cultural mythologies.

A Long Arc concludes with a wide-ranging and provocative selection of photographs made in the past two decades. Artists like Richard Misrach, Lucas Foglia, Gillian Laub, An-My Lê, Sheila Pree-Bright, RaMell Ross and Jose Ibarra Rizo explore Southern history and American identity in the 21st century as forged by legacies of slavery and white supremacy, marked by economic inequality and environmental catastrophe and transformed by immigration, technology, urbanization, globalization and shifting ethnic, cultural, racial and sexual identities.

A complex and layered archive of the region, A Long Arc captures how the South has occupied an uneasy place in the history of American photography, while simultaneously exemplifying regional exceptionalism and the crucible from which American identity has been forged over the past two centuries.

For more information about the exhibition A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845, please visit www.VMFA.museum.

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

200 North Arthur Ashe Blvd

Richmond, VA 23220 

(804) 340-1400