Search results for ""author margaret sartor""

Self-taught photographer Hugh Mangum was born in 1877 in Durham, North Carolina, as its burgeoning tobacco economy put the frontier-like boomtown on the map. As an itinerant portraitist working primarily in North Carolina and Virginia during the rise of Jim Crow, Mangum welcomed into his temporary studios a clientele that was both racially and economically diverse. After his death in 1922, his glass plate negatives remained stored in his darkroom, a tobacco barn, for fifty years. Slated for demolition in the 1970s, the barn was saved at the last moment-and with it, this surprising and unparalleled document of life at the turn of the twentieth century, a turbulent time in the history of the American South. Hugh Mangum's multiple-image, glass plate negatives reveal the open-door policy of his studio to show us lives marked both by notable affluence and hard work, all imbued with a strong sense of individuality, self-creation, and often joy. Seen and experienced in the present, the portraits hint at unexpected relationships and histories and also confirm how historical photographs have the power to subvert familiar narratives. Mangum's photographs are not only images; they are objects that have survived a history of their own and exist within the larger political and cultural history of the American South, demonstrating the unpredictable alchemy that often characterizes the best art-its ability over time to evolve with and absorb life and meaning beyond the intentions or expectations of the artist.

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The American South has become a nexus of film production in the United States. By 2016, more major features were being shot in Georgia than in California. Commissioned by the High Museum in Atlanta as part of their Picturing the South series, Alex Harris explored cinematic representations of the South by visiting and photographing the making of over 40 independent fiction films across the region. Using a documentary approach to capture scenes that unfolded on or around the set, Harris’ images tell the story of a new South while also hinting at more universal aspects of life – the ways in which we are all actors in our own lives, creating our sets, practicing our lines, refining our characters, playing ourselves. These photographs also tell a story about our increasingly visual culture and explore the rapidly evolving world of independent filmmaking, one that is little known to audiences outside the film festival circuit.

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The eye is sovereign in every art but music. Reading, writing and painting are all but soundless deeds of sight."" These are the words of Reynolds Price (1933-2011), one America's greatest writers. In his novels, short stories, poems and plays - forty-one books in all - Price renders with keenness, clarity and profound eloquence the experience of life, both the visible and invisible, the outward and the interior. What is not well known is that Price was also a visionary collector. In his modest North Carolina house, nestled among southern pines and hardwoods, Price - confined to a wheelchair for the last three decades of his life - curated and arranged his books, photographs, paintings, sculptures, masks, religious icons, and objects he collected, purchased, or was given over the years, creating a visual environment that directly reflected his life, his experiences, his passions and preoccupations.After his death in 2011, Price's family invited acclaimed photographer, Alex Harris to photograph the house. In this remarkably intimate and revealing book, Harris and his wife, writer Margaret Sartor, pair sixty of Harris's color photographs with excerpts from Price's fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and interviews. As longtime neighbors and friends who spent time in his house over many years, they show the ways in which the art and memorabilia Price collected inspired his writing and illuminates connections between the visible world he constructed and the creations of his mind. As we turn the pages of this book, it is as if Reynolds Price himself takes us on a guided tour of his home. And as we walk through his rooms, he reveals his private world, recounts significant episodes in his life, and speaks with wisdom and humor about the people, ideas, and beliefs most important to him. As readers we follow, we listen, and we see. Reynolds Price's connection to his house - where he lived and worked for over four decades - offers insight into our own lives and loves, teaches us about the importance of place, shows how to be fully engaged in the world, how to strive to live a meaningful life.

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Mysterious, introspective, fiercely private, and self-taught, street photographer William Gedney (1932–1989) produced impressive series of images focused on people whose lives were overlooked, hidden, or reduced to stereotypes. He was convinced that photography was a means of expression as efficient as literature, and his images were accompanied by writings, essays, excerpts from books, and aphorisms. Gedney avoided self-promotion, and his underrepresented work was largely unknown during his short lifetime. He died at the age of fifty-six from AIDS.William Gedney: Only the Lonely, 1955–1984 is the first comprehensive retrospective of his photography. It presents images from all of his major series, including eastern Kentucky, where Gedney lived with and photographed the family of laid-off coal miner Willie Cornett; San Francisco and Haight-Ashbury, where he attached himself to a group of disaffected youth, photographing them as they drifted from one vacant apartment to the next during the “Summer of Love”; early photo-reportage of gay pride parades in the eighties; Benares, India, Gedney’s first trip abroad, during which he obsessively chronicled the concurrent difficulty and beauty of daily life; and night scenes that, in the absence of people and movement, evoke a profound universal loneliness. The most complete overview of Gedney’s work to date, this volume reveals the undeniable beauty of a major American photographer.

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