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Walking parallel along a two-dimensional timeline of the American South since 1845, tensions of the times are immortalized through still-life. A country’s whole is disseminated into parts that become a whole again, encapsulated in photographic images which reveal the expansion of rural farm towns and the pursuit of civil rights. The essence of humanity is revealed through the relationship of an object to its surroundings, forever tethered to the uprising and unsettlement that shaped its very existence. “A Long Arc,” on view through July 31 at the Addison Gallery of American Art, presents a documentation of a region’s pastoral landscapes over time.
For all of its glassed transparency, Gordon Parks’ “Ondria Tanner and Her Grandmother Window-Shopping, Mobile, Alabama,” 1956, captures a moment of intimacy shared between two generations. Not only is the photo layered in its composition of rowed models and tall windows, but it tells of distance despite clarity. The young girl, standing outside of the department store, gazes up toward the white mannequins while her grandmother looks down with a face of understanding. She too was once a young girl who felt the effects of separation, imparting themselves upon 1956 Alabama through something as childishly innocent as the want for pretty clothes or through something as serious as race riots.
The mannequins stand upon a pedestal to be viewed, situated as an object of heightened desire for both white and black people in the pursuit of social status for the former and basic civil rights for the latter. Parks’ distinction between the pale plastic being on view while his Black subjects observe them subverts the relationship that was typical of the 1950s, when the black body was treated as a prop in a more violent manner than even the mannequins pictured here receive.
Gordon Parks photographed for the Farm Security Administration throughout the early 1940s, utilizing his documentary perspective to show the barren people and places of the south. It became the mission of the FSA to raise the American consciousness to empathize with the desperation of farmers, who had been displaced by drought, dust and the Depression. At the time that this photo was captured, abolitionist efforts had become violent in the state’s metropolitan center.
While campaigning against the legal segregation of Birmingham buses, Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth called for a peaceful protest that resulted in the arrest of 21 supporters. Parks referenced his earlier style to capture his Black American subjects with the same desperation during the Jim Crow Era, this time hoping for racial equality.
William Eggleston removed the layer of commercialization to reveal the truths found in mundanity through his turn from black and white photography to color. The everyday scenes he photographed, often in empty motel rooms or barren gas stations, envelop his subject with a richness found in color, material and landscape; telling a story of a suburbanized Americana.
Eggleston reimagined and redefined the way people viewed the South, imbuing the photos of his home region with the same importance and urgency that a colorized advertisement of its time would have. The photographer almost advertises the rural South by presenting its very essence in a single frame, stripped of frivolity but full of life.
In “Huntsville, Alabama,” 1978, Eggleston depicts a typical scene of loneliness despite being surrounded by opportunity. The photo centers a working class man whose despondent slouch of his shoulder tips forward his accessory of a drinking glass, exuding the feeling that he is consumed with thought but cannot express them in his solitude. The door is open, but the subject cannot bring himself to look at its possibilities. The fluorescent overhead lighting bounces off of the shiny, creped fabric of the hotel bedding, illuminating the man’s cheekbones and his lived-in skin. The photo’s colors are deep and opulent, but do not provide any sense of fullness to suggest that the man, dressed in business attire, has a rich inner life that awaits him after his work is done for the day.
Interspersed throughout the collection are some of Addison Gallery’s permanent pieces. “Untitled, Sumner, Mississippi,” 1971, supplementing Eggleston’s 1978 work, portrays a duo in an autumnal setting of isolation. Captured in 1971, decaying leaves and brown-reflected water tinge the photo with a sepia tone. Both men, like in Huntsville, Alabama, look beyond the lens for an un-pictured figure, or perhaps for hope.
Eggleston’s beautifully composed scene in “Cassidy Bayou, Sumner, Mississippi,” displays his uncle, Adyn Schuyler Senior, and his driver, Jasper Staples, sharing in the solemn universal moment that comes before or after a funeral. The men stand tantamount to the trees, unmoving; it’s almost as if they have always been there, feet planted on the forest floor, standing above the resting ground for their bodies to later return to. Both of Eggleston’s photos are plain yet conscious, humanizing moments of lifeless objects that are full of possibility.
Sheila Pree Bright’s contemporary, minimalistic scene of a home’s library is somewhat abrasive within the context of the collection, but it is an appreciated dissent from some of the brutal images that came before it. Each shelf appears to be meticulously stylized, perhaps even designed for viewing pleasure alone. But when you look beyond the curated image as a whole to read the titles of the books and gaze upon the precious objects, the image unveils a deeper sentiment.
Amongst the relics that serve as a historicization of the past are coffee table books that feature Frida Kahlo, Pablo Picasso and Paul Gaugin. All were artists whose personal lives and art were threaded with political and interpersonal strife, marking their paintings with an imaginative embellishment of reality through artistic expression. Pictured toward the left of the shelves is Debra J. Dickerson’s “The End of Black-Ness,” which urges Black Americans to remove themselves from racism of the past in order to reshape their futures. The tribal mask from central Africa and indigenous vase both represent a cultural homage, persisting as artifacts of beauty and archives of the past.
The photo struck me with a conflicting sense of melancholy. Have we really progressed far enough past the campaign for civil rights that its history books and found objects are now used as mere decoration? The title of the series, Suburbia, points to the rise of modernization; for all of our technological and societal advancements, we should not forget how close we remain to our unjust history.
Transparency begets understanding. “A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845” presents the effects of truly looking at someone as opposed to looking through them, casting aside the notion of physicality. Just as a place’s banal terrain is made important by the memories it beholds, a person’s body is merely a way of housing their soul. Despite the urbanization of the American South over the past two centuries, its core value of domestic patriotism has not strayed. Perhaps it has not been such a long arc after all.
(“A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845” continues through July 31 at the Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, 3 Chapel Ave., Andover, Massachusetts. For more information, visit addison.andover.edu.)