Reckonings and Reconstructions - by Jeffrey Richmond-Moll (Hardcover)

About the Book

"This exhibition and accompanying catalogue are the first large-scale survey of the Do Good Fund's remarkable and sweeping collection of photography made in the South from the 1950s to the present. Since its founding 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. The collection includes images by more than 25 Guggenheim Fellows, five Magnum Photographers and two Henri Cartier-Bresson Award winners as well as images by lesser-known or emerging photographers from the region. In part a survey of the art and artists within Do Good's holdings, the exhibition is also and more crucially a scholarly investigation of southern photography since World War II"--

Book Synopsis

"Can photography help extend our understanding of the South and see the region in a broader American context?" writes essayist and southern literature scholar W. Ralph Eubanks in Reckonings and Reconstructions. "Yes, but what we see in an image often depends on what we already know."

Reckonings and Reconstructions is a visual and textual investigation of southern photography since World War II. The book and its partner exhibition present 125 color photographs from the Do Good Fund by a wide-ranging group of 77 photographers, diverse in gender, race, ethnicity, and region.

W. Ralph Eubanks addresses southern memory and the ethics of photography. Grace Elizabeth Hale considers the role of Athens, Georgia--with its vibrant community of photographers, renowned photography program at the University of Georgia, and celebrated alternative art and music scene--within the history of southern photography. The essays that follow by Jasmine Amussen, Rosalind Bentley, Lauren Henkin, Jeffrey Richmond-Moll, RaMell Ross, and Jeff Whetstone examine expansive and internally paradoxical themes: land, labor, law and protest, migration, food, ritual, and kin.

Together, these themes link disparate works in the Do Good collection and capture southern history, culture, and identity in all its complexity and contradictions. With the photographs as their backbone, these essays help construct and deconstruct each thematic category, resisting notions of the South as a retrograde region and instead presenting the ever-changing qualities of the place and its people. A region where despair and hope, terror and beauty, pain and joy, and trauma and dignity coexist and comingle. A place seeking reconciliation and restoration, captured by photographers with a vision of a "Better South."

Review Quotes

There is no Athens school of photography. They are simply artists who live and make work there, part of a
creative community that exists because of the university and the scene. Their best pictures do what all great art
does: they help us see.

--Grace Elizabeth Hale "author of Cool Town: How Athens, Georgia, Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture"

These images inspire the viewer to see a connection between this region below the Mason-Dixon Line and the
rest of the country that lies above that archaic artificial border.

--W. Ralph Eubanks "author of A Place Like Mississippi: A Journey Through a Real and Imagined Literary Landscape"

About the Author

JEFFREY RICHMOND-MOLL is the curator of American art at the Georgia Museum of Art and cochair of the Association of Historians of American Art. He is the author of the exhibition catalog Extra Ordinary: Magic, Mystery, and Imagination in American Realism. His work has also been published in several journals, such as Archives of American Art Journal, MAVCOR Journal, and Winterthur Portfolio: A Journal of American Material Culture. He lives in Athens, Georgia.