Beautiful writing by Richmond-Moll in The Bitter Southerner on the exhibition Reckonings and Reconstructions: Southern Photography from the Do Good Fund on now at the Georgia Museum of Art.
“Together these pictures also challenge common assumptions about Southernness. While some images present a South seemingly frozen in time, others show another, perhaps unexpected, South. Jennifer Garza-Cuen captures a young girl standing in the road deep in a forest, a snake wriggling around one arm. It’s an image that plays on the stereotypes of Southern otherness: charismatic serpent handlers, primitive woods people. But in her youthful innocence and unwavering pose, she steadfastly offers another way of being in and with nature — of being reconciled and brought back to Eden, before the mythic curse that pitted woman and serpent against each other. Seen together, as essayist W. Ralph Eubanks observes in the catalog, these photographs collapse the mythic, the historical, the familiar, the bewildering, and the rapidly shifting U.S. South.”
~ Essay by Jeffrey Richmond-Moll
Link to full article: Looking Back, Seeing Forward - The Bitter Southerner
