The largest photography exhibition to date at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, this sprawling “New Southern Photography” show, curated by Richard McCabe, features diverse yet cohesive images by 25 emerging and mid-career Southern artists. Presented as a series of photographic essays reflecting the contemporary cultural paradoxes that define the former Confederate states, the works pick up where we were left by the often deeply psychological pioneers of New South photographic modernism, such as William Eggleston, Sally Mann and William Christenberry. Alabama native Celestia Morgan's “Redline” series adopts a postmodern socioeconomic approach by juxtaposing geometric maplike shapes in the sky with photographs of crumbling old houses in neighborhoods that were “red-lined” — a discriminatory banking practice of denying loans based on demographics. Many of Morgan's house portraits evoke an elegiac pathos that recalls the poignant sense of abandonment conveyed by 1930s social documentary maestros Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange.
