Alex Harris
Alex Harris
Our Strange New Land
Hardcover
10.325 x 8.5 inches
144 pages
Edition of 500
Published by Yoffy Press
2021
About the Book:
A glimpse of life in the American South with all its complexities. (Art Net News)
Commissioned by the High Museum in Atlanta as part of its Picturing the South series, photographer Alex Harris chose to examine the rapidly evolving world of independent fiction filmmaking while also exploring our increasingly visual culture. Made on over 40 film sets throughout the region, his photographs reveal a new generation of filmmakers coming to terms with matters of race, class, and sexuality that relate not just to the South but to the whole country. Harris’ photographs also hint at more universal aspects of life – the ways in which we are all actors in our own lives, creating our sets, practicing our lines, refining our characters, playing ourselves.
Blurring the lines between documentary and fiction, Alex Harris and Margaret Sartor have created this immersive photobook, using still photographs to evoke their own cinematic-like narrative. Our Strange New Land is a portrait of the American South that is at once familiar and surprising, delightful and frightening, sobering and beautiful.
As Charles Bethea wrote about one photograph from this book for the New Yorker, “Harris’s photograph bring(s) to mind the especially painful intertwined histories of race and law enforcement in the South. Yet the scene is a doubly staged moment of conflict—a picture of another picture being made in a region, and a country, that has not yet been able to fully make sense of, or prevent, scenes of the real thing.”
Photographs by Alex Harris
Edited by Alex Harris and Margaret Sartor
Essay by Roni Nicole Henderson-Day
Book review by Vann Powell |
Alex Harris’ new book Our Strange New Land (Co Edited by Margaret Sartor) explores the American South in a fresh manner not wholly explored before. No stranger to the South himself, Alex Harris lives in Durham, North Carolina, and is aware of the complexities, ironies, and heartbreaks of the South.
This project is the result of a High Museum commission where Harris found himself photographing 42 independent narrative movie sets between 2017 and 2019 in the American South. Through the fictitious landscape of narrative filmmaking, Alex Harris walks the line between reality and fiction, and in the process, what emerges from the frame is an honest glimpse at a region whose stories and storytellers have often tended towards the romantic. In a time where looking back offers relative calm and admits a divisive present and a foreboding future, Harris’ photographs take a look at the South's present, head on.
Harris ignores the tried and tested visual cliches in favor of a nuanced way of picturing the South. In many places the South is haunted by past trauma that arises into contemporary conflicts, and this is deftly shown in the images Harris makes, and the route he takes through the lens of other creatives is altogether an interesting worthwhile journey. Topics such as race, class, and gender are shown with a respect for the gravity of their complex roles in society.
Harris does not shy away. There is a sense that Harris himself is working through these issues in collaboration by documenting the creative filmmaking process along with the actors and everyone involved.
Our Strange New Land is a view of a world inside of a world. That is to say we get a glimpse of the real inside of the fictional world of the movie set. Looking through the images we are immediately immersed in a world with all its strange mundane brilliance - scenes of lovers embraced would seem sentimental and commonplace if it were not for the lighting crew just on the other side of the frame.
Harris’ photographs of surreal juxtapositions on the movie set allow the viewer to empathize with these honest moments; it seems often the case that life passes us by, not too dissimilar to the way time passes while watching a film - engrossed in the unfolding of events on a impossible to see timeline. What is most impactful in Harris photographs in Our Strange New Land are when his photographs capture the everyday feelings we all have in this tilt-a-whirl world.
