The walk from the Lee Circle streetcar stop to the Ogden is punctuated by a column divested of its Confederate monument, a manicured lawn patrolled by the homeless, and Confederate Memorial Hall. The museum’s current exhibition is haunted by this context; twenty-five photographers and filmmakers offer images of a “new,” uncertain South.
The influence of the Southern documentary tradition, of Walker Evans and William Christenberry and Birney Imes, is outsize in the show. RaMell Ross returns to the now majority-black Hale County, Alabama, where Evans and James Agee once set their chronicle of tenant farmers; Andrew Moore gives us troublingly lush glimpses of contemporary Southern ruins (an abandoned amusement park, a stranded trailer); and Kael Alford documents the communities of southern Louisiana, where land is being swallowed by the Gulf.
