Subverting Expectations: Photographing the American South | Aperture Conversations

“A Long Arc” meditates on American identity through one of its most mythologized and depicted regions. Not only have many iconic photographs and landmark bodies of work been created in the South, but 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 past.

Photographers featured in the book—Baldwin Lee, Irina Rozovsky, and Jose Ibarra Rizo—discuss coming to the South from radically different places, and the ways in which they aim to give visibility to people and communities by making pictures unconstrained by social or prior photographic expectations. Curator Sarah Kennel moderates.

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This event was recorded live on December 5, 2023.

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Image: José Ibarra Rizo, “Limbeth and Karim,” 2021; from “A Long Arc: Photography and the American South” (Aperture, 2023). © José Ibarra Rizo, courtesy the artist

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Dr. Sarah Kennel is the inaugural Aaron Siskind Curator of Photography and director of the Raysor Center for Works on Paper at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Kennel has curated, published, and presented widely on topics ranging from nineteenth-century French photography and historic photographic processes to European modernism and understudied women photographers. She has curated and co-curated many exhibitions, including Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings in 2018, Order of Imagination: The Photographs of Olivia Parker in 2019; Underexposed: Women Photographers from the Collection in 2021 and Willie Anne Wright: Artist and Alchemist in 2023.

Baldwin Lee is a Chinese American photographer and educator known for his photographs of African American communities in the Southern United States. Lee holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he studied photography under Minor White, and a Master of Fine Arts from Yale University. Lee’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Chrysler Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia. His photographs are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the University of Michigan Museum of Art, the University of Kentucky Art Museum, the Yale University Art Gallery, and the Museum of the City of New York. He has been honored with fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (1984) and the National Endowment for the Arts (1984 and 1990).

Irina Rozovsky (born 1981, USSR), makes photographs of people and places, transforming external landscapes into interior states. She has published three monographs: One to Nothing (Kehrer, 2011), Island in my Mind (Verlag Kettler, 2015), and In Plain Air (MACK, 2021). Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others. Irina lives and works in Athens, Georgia where she and her husband Mark Steinmetz run the photography project space The Humid.

Jose Ibarra Rizo is a Mexican American multidisciplinary artist living and working in Atlanta, Georgia. His work primarily focuses on identity and is currently exploring the migrant experience in the American South. José is the recipient of the inaugural MINT + ACP Emerging Artist Fellowship, one of three awardees for the 2022 Atlanta Artadia Awards, and one of three winners of the 2023–2024 Working Artist Project for MOCA GA. His work is included in the permanent collection of the High Museum of Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, and his clients include Rolling Stone and TIME magazine.

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All photographs courtesy the artists

Aperture Conversations Intro Sequence Photo Credits: Joel Meyerowitz, ”Red Interior, Provincetown, Massachusetts,” 1977; Dawit L. Petros, “Hadenbes,” 2005; Kimowan Metchewais, “Indian Handsign, Albuquerque, New Mexico,” 1997. National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution; Jamie Hawkesworth, “Untitled,” 2011–21. Courtesy the artist; Thalía Gochez, “Every Worry Melts Away (Naomi Rodriguez and Grace Sanabria), San Francisco,” 2019; Alec Soth, “White Bear Lake, Minnesota,” 2019, © Courtesy the artist; Sean Kelly, New York; Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco; and Weinstein Hammons Gallery, Minneapolis; Tommy Kha, “Headtown XI/Narcissus VII, Madison Avenue, Midtown, Memphis,” 2021; Sara Cwynar, Film still from “Rose Gold,” 2017, © Sara Cwynar