Reckonings and Reconstructions: Southern Photography from the Do Good Fund [Hardcover]

JEFFREY RICHMOND-MOLL is the curator of American art at the Georgia Museum of Art and cochair of the Association of Historians of American Art. He is the author of the exhibition catalog Extra Ordinary: Magic, Mystery, and Imagination in American Realism. His work has also been published in several journals, such as Archives of American Art Journal, MAVCOR Journal, and Winterthur Portfolio: A Journal of American Material Culture. He lives in Athens, Georgia.

Can photography help extend our understanding of the South and see the region in a broader American context? writes essayist and southern literature scholar W. Ralph Eubanks in Reckonings and Reconstructions. Yes, but what we see in an image often depends on what we already know.

Reckonings and Reconstructions is a visual and textual investigation of southern photography since World War II. The book and its partner exhibition present 125 color photographs from the Do Good Fund by a wide-ranging group of 77 photographers, diverse in gender, race, ethnicity, and region.

W. Ralph Eubanks addresses southern memory and the ethics of photography. Grace Elizabeth Hale considers the role of Athens, Georgia—with its vibrant community of photographers, renowned photography program at the University of Georgia, and celebrated alternative art and music scene—within the history of southern photography. The essays that follow by Jasmine Amussen, Rosalind Bentley, Lauren Henkin, Jeffrey Richmond-Moll, RaMell Ross, and Jeff Whetstone examine expansive and internally paradoxical themes: land, labor, law and protest, migration, food, ritual, and kin.

Together, these themes link disparate works in the Do Good collection and capture southern history, culture, and identity in all its complexity and contrl3¢