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Collects over 150 years of key moments in the visual history of the
Southern United States, with over two hundred photographs taken
from 1850 to present The South is perhaps the most mythologized
region in the United States and also one of the most depicted.
Since the dawn of photography in the nineteenth century,
photographers have articulated the distinct and evolving character
of the South’s people, landscape, and culture and reckoned with
its fraught history. Indeed, many of the urgent questions we face
today about what defines the American experience—from racism,
poverty, and the legacy of slavery to environmental disaster,
immigration, and the changes wrought by a modern, global
economy—appear as key themes in the photography of the South. The
visual history of the South is inextricably intertwined with the
history of photography and also the history of America, and is
therefore an apt lens through which to examine American identity. A
Long Arc: Photography and the American South accompanies a major
exhibition at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, with more than one
hundred photographers represented, including Walker Evans, Robert
Frank, Gordon Parks, William Eggleston, Sally Mann, Carrie Mae
Weems, Dawoud Bey, Alec Soth, and An-My Lê. Insightful texts by
Imani Perry, Sarah Kennel, Makeda Best, and Rahim Fortune, among
others, illuminate this broad survey of photographs of the Southern
United States as an essential American story. Copublished by
Aperture and High Museum of Art, Atlanta
In the summer of 1978, the B-52's conquered the New York
underground. A year later, the band's self-titled debut album burst
onto the Billboard charts, capturing the imagination of fans and
music critics worldwide. The fact that the group had formed in the
sleepy southern college town of Athens, Georgia, only increased the
fascination. Soon, more Athens bands followed the B-52's into the
vanguard of the new American music that would come to be known as
"alternative," including R.E.M., who catapulted over the course of
the 1980s to the top of the musical mainstream. As acts like the
B-52's, R.E.M., and Pylon drew the eyes of New York tastemakers
southward, they discovered in Athens an unexpected mecca of music,
experimental art, DIY spirit, and progressive politics--a creative
underground as vibrant as any to be found in the country's major
cities. In Athens in the eighties, if you were young and willing to
live without much money, anything seemed possible. Cool Town
reveals the passion, vitality, and enduring significance of a
bohemian scene that became a model for others to follow. Grace
Elizabeth Hale experienced the Athens scene as a student,
small-business owner, and band member. Blending personal
recollection with a historian's eye, she reconstructs the networks
of bands, artists, and friends that drew on the things at hand to
make a new art of the possible, transforming American culture along
the way. In a story full of music and brimming with hope, Hale
shows how an unlikely cast of characters in an unlikely place made
a surprising and beautiful new world.
At mid-century, Americans increasingly fell in love with characters
like Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye and Marlon Brando's
Johnny in The Wild One, musicians like Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan,
and activists like the members of the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee. These emotions enabled some middle-class
whites to cut free of their own histories and identify with those
who, while lacking economic, political, or social privilege, seemed
to possess instead vital cultural resources and a depth of feeling
not found in "grey flannel" America.
In this wide-ranging and vividly written cultural history, Grace
Elizabeth Hale sheds light on why so many white middle-class
Americans chose to re-imagine themselves as outsiders in the second
half of the twentieth century and explains how this unprecedented
shift changed American culture and society. Love for outsiders
launched the politics of both the New Left and the New Right. From
the mid-sixties through the eighties, it flourished in the hippie
counterculture, the back-to-the-land movement, the Jesus People
movement, and among fundamentalist and Pentecostal Christians
working to position their traditional isolation and separatism as
strengths. It changed the very meaning of "authenticity" and
"community."
Ultimately, the romance of the outsider provided a creative
resolution to an intractable mid-century cultural and political
conflict-the struggle between the desire for self-determination and
autonomy and the desire for a morally meaningful and authentic
life.
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