Subverting Expectations: Photographing the American South

Aperture presents a panel discussion between photographers Baldwin Lee, Irina Rozovsky, and Jose Ibarra Rizo as they discuss coming to the South from radically different places, and the ways in which they aim to give visibility to people and communities by making pictures unconstrained by social or prior photographic expectations. Curator Sarah Kennel will moderate this conversation, celebrating the recent release of A Long Arc: Photography and the American South (Aperture, 2023), and its coinciding exhibition tour first on view at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.

A Long Arc meditates on American identity through one of its most mythologized and depicted regions. Not only have many iconic photographs and landmark bodies of work been created in the South, but since the dawn of photography in the nineteenth century, photographers have articulated the distinct and evolving character of the South’s people, landscape, and culture and reckoned with its fraught past.

This virtual public program is free and open to all.

The exhibition will be on view at the High Museum of Art through January 14, 2024, then travel to the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts (March 1–July 31, 2024), and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond (October 5, 2024–January 26, 2025).

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A Long Arc: Photography and the American South

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Dr. Sarah Kennel is the inaugural Aaron Siskind Curator of Photography and director of the Raysor Center for Works on Paper at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Kennel has curated, published, and presented widely on topics ranging from nineteenth-century French photography and historic photographic processes to European modernism and understudied women photographers. She has curated and co-curated many exhibitions, including Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings in 2018, Order of Imagination: The Photographs of Olivia Parker in 2019;  Underexposed: Women Photographers from the Collection in 2021 and Willie Anne Wright: Artist and Alchemist in 2023. She has also written extensively on nineteenth-century photography and the relationship between painting and photography in nineteenth-century France and completed her dissertation on the relationship between dance and the visual arts in early twentieth-century culture at the University of California, Berkeley. She has previously held curatorial positions at the National Gallery of Art, Washington; the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem; and most recently, the High Museum of Art, Atlanta where she and Gregory Harris co-curated A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845 currently on view at the High Museum and traveling in 2024 to the Addison Gallery of American Art and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

Baldwin Lee is a Chinese American photographer and educator known for his photographs of African American communities in the Southern United States. Lee holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he studied photography under Minor White, and a Master of Fine Arts from Yale University. Lee’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Chrysler Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia. His photographs are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the University of Michigan Museum of Art, the University of Kentucky Art Museum, the Yale University Art Gallery, and the Museum of the City of New York. He has been honored with fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (1984) and the National Endowment for the Arts (1984 and 1990).

Irina Rozovsky (born 1981, USSR), makes photographs of people and places, transforming external landscapes into interior states. She has published three monographs: One to Nothing (Kehrer, 2011), Island in my Mind (Verlag Kettler, 2015), and In Plain Air (MACK, 2021). Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others. Irina lives and works in Athens, Georgia where she and her husband Mark Steinmetz run the photography project space The Humid.

Jose Ibarra Rizo is a Mexican American multidisciplinary artist living and working in Atlanta, Georgia. His work primarily focuses on identity and is currently exploring the migrant experience in the American South. José is the recipient of the inaugural MINT + ACP Emerging Artist Fellowship, one of three awardees for the 2022 Atlanta Artadia Awards, and one of three winners of the 2023–2024 Working Artist Project for MOCA GA. His work is included in the permanent collection of the High Museum of Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, and his clients include Rolling Stone and TIME magazine.

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Image: José Ibarra Rizo, Limbeth and Karim, 2021; from A Long Arc: Photography and the American South (Aperture, 2023). © José Ibarra Rizo, courtesy the artist