Our Strange New Land: Photographs by Alex Harris

This latest chapter in the High’s “Picturing the South” commission series features new work made by North Carolina-based photographer Alex Harris (American, b. 1949) on independent film sets throughout the South to explore how the region is seen, imagined and created by contemporary visual storytellers. Harris photographed both the scenes constructed for the film production and the activity that unfolded around the sets in adjacent communities, often blurring the lines between staged storytelling and real life.

With the South’s diverse topography as a backdrop, Harris strings together impeccably lit and meticulously composed images to build an intuitive narrative that vacillates among deep sorrow, explosive anger and mundane anticipation. Though he leaves clues, Harris never fully reveals which pictures are contrived for the cinema and which are proximate documentary happenstance. His photographs poignantly record the current wave of filmmaking in the region while also exploring the back-and-forth between fiction and reality and between past and present in the South as portrayed in film.​

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website