Picturing the South
Initiated in 1996, the High Museum’s Picturing the South project provides a current perspective on Southern subjects and themes while building the Museum’s collection of contemporary photography. The works commissioned for this series have inspired some of today’s foremost photographers to create fresh chapters in ongoing projects as well as wholly new bodies of work: Sally Mann’s inaugural commission supported her shift to landscape work, and Alec Soth’s 2009 commission resulted in many of the photographs that would become his celebrated Broken Manual series. Other notable commissions include Dawoud Bey’s portraits of Atlanta high school students, Richard Misrach’s elegiac documentation of the Mississippi Delta’s “Cancer Alley,” and Martin Parr’s sardonic take on Atlanta high society.