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

Idol Structures accompanies an exhibition at the DePaul Art Museum of recent photographs and sculptures by Chicago-based artist Matt Siber, whose work explores the systems of corporate and mass-media communication that permeate the urban landscape. Instead of focusing on the information itself, Siber emphasizes the physical infrastructure of these systems. Photographs of the narrow edges of signs, sculptures of billboard ads hanging so loosely that their text is obscured in the folds, and other unique treatments of promotional materials distort and subvert the intended messages. The artist's deconstruction of such commercial efforts reveals an element of communication meant to remain invisible and subservient to image, text, and graphics. By highlighting the everyday objects used to persuade and influence, Siber's art undermines these communication systems' ability to do precisely what they were intended to do.

Led by artists Lauren Bon, Richard Nielsen, and Tristan Duke, the Optics Division of the Metabolic Studio is a team devoted to exploring and expanding the photographic medium. Working with the Liminal Camera, a massive, portable camera obscura fashioned from a shipping container, the Optics Division uses experimental technology in an ongoing effort to map and depict the American landscape. From the arid West to New York's waterways, the camera has captured dramatic scenes of regions in transition. As part of this project, The Liminal Camera presents newly commissioned photographs made in and around Chicago. Though enormous in size, the camera, transported on a semi-trailer truck, was unobtrusive from an outsider's perspective, allowing the artists to work without drawing attention. Photographs could be developed from within the shipping container, blending the image's subject with the process of photography itself. The resulting large-scale prints not only highlight the evolving history of photographic imaging, but also locate the city within a complex global network of transportation systems, industry, and commerce.