Joel Sternfeld’s Domestic workers waiting for the bus, Atlanta, Georgia, April, (1983) might be the most mundane of nearly 200 photographs on view in “A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845.” Three Black women (domestic workers) stand in the street (waiting for the bus) of an otherwise empty neighborhood (Atlanta).
Amidst the pictures of war and poverty and protest and violence and German Shepherd’s and Martin Luther King being arrested, there’s no particular reason to be stopped in your tracks by this wholly banal scene. Unless you’ve been there, as I have.
The picture’s title refers to Atlanta, I’d place this as a particular neighborhood in the suburban community of Sandy Springs, where I once lived. If I haven’t been on this exact street, perhaps even in one of these homes, I’ve been within a half mile of it.
That was more like 2003, but whether 1983, 2003, or 2023, I would be willing to bet a dollar to a donut–to use a Southern phrase–the street looks exactly the same today. Lawns uniformly closely clipped. Pine straw covering the landscaping. Everything just so.
Order. Conformity. Genteel. Southern.
There’s no need for a “white’s only” sign, it’s implied.
The women employed dusting and polishing inside the brick mansions wait on the bus because they can’t afford to own a car. I can assure you no one living in any of the houses along the street would be caught dead riding the bus in Atlanta–or even know how to. It’s just not done.
They drive cars. Nice ones. Big SUVs and European sedans.
This is an image of white privilege.
The picture speaks to America’s structural racism and its racial wealth gap with a whisper, not a scream. Doing so reveals how it’s not just the racist sheriffs and brutes who poured milkshakes over the head of sit-in protesters at the Woolworth’s counter back in the day who are complicit in those systems. Doing so reminds us that the struggle for equality extends beyond the dramatic. Beyond the Edmond Pettis Bridge in Selma, or the bus boycotts in Montgomery.
It reminds us that we all play a part, often in ways we don’t even recognize.
Domestic workers waiting for the bus, Atlanta, Georgia, April can be seen at the Addison Gallery of American Art on the campus of Phillips Academy in Andover, MA as part of “A Long Arc” through July 31, 2024.
‘Dwelling in the Muck’
Organized by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, “A Long Arc” is the first major survey of Southern photography in the new millennium. Beginning with pictures from the dawn of photography in the Antebellum South of the 1840s through the Civil War, Great Depression, Civil Rights and through to the 2000s, the exhibition both reveals the South’s critical impact on the evolution of American photography and examines the region’s complex history.
The Massachusetts museum’s interest in Southern photography is historic.
Opening in 1931, the Addison acquired its first photographs in 1934–four prints by Margaret Bourke-White. This was decades before most museums in the United States began taking photography seriously as a fine art. Also in 1934, the Addison presented solo exhibitions of work by Bourke-White and Walker Evans (a Phillips Academy alumnus), both of whom have pictures featured in “A Long Arc.”
“The Addison’s commitment to photography has not wavered over the past 90 years and photographs now comprise over half of our 26,000-plus object strong collection,” Gordon Wilkins, Robert M. Walker Curator of American Art at the Addison Gallery of American Art, told Forbes.com. “It is impossible to tell the story of American photography without engaging with the history of photography in the American South, and that reality is manifested through our incredibly diverse and rich holdings of photographs of the South.”
Gordon Parks, Ondria Tanner and Her Grandmother Window-Shopping, Mobile, Alabama, 1956, printed … [+]
Courtesy of and copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation.
The Addison Gallery lent over 20 works from its permanent collection to “A Long Arc,” and its presentation of the exhibition features dozens of additional works it owns.
“The irony of the High borrowing key, iconic works of Southern photography from the collection of a museum attached to the most quintessentially New England boarding school is not lost on us,” Wilkins added.
As distinct a region of the country as the South is–and New England for that matter– both–all regions–are now intractably bound to what has become the United States. What goes on in Mississippi maters in Massachusetts and vice versa.
“For those who have spent most of their lives in New England or, more broadly, in the ‘North,’ the South can oftentimes seem like a foreign country. As someone who has spent the bulk of their life and career in New England, I’ve often been struck by how persistently the South is ‘othered’ or treated as a foil, selectively employed to assert the relative virtue or progressiveness of the North in contradistinction to a backward, regressive South,” Wilkins said. “This exhibition lays bare the fallacy of this flawed logic and forces audiences to confront their preconceptions of the South—and, in many respects, reckon with the role that photography has played in the construction of their assumptions. As Sarah Kennel astutely points out in her (exhibition catalogue) essay, ‘part of the problem, it seems, is that we are still asking the question of whether the South is an exception to American democracy or the very crucible from which America’s identity was forged.’”
While organized chronologically, “A Long Arc” makes no attempt to impose a single, overarching narrative or thesis to 170-years of history across a vast and diverse chunk of the nation.
“It does not attempt to succinctly distill the messiness and infinite nuance of the Southern experience into an easily digestible parade of ‘greatest hits’ ended with a satisfying denouement,” Wilkins has previously written. “Instead, this exhibition encourages its viewers to dwell in the muck and the mire—to allow the remarkable photographs assembled for this once in a generation exhibition to bear witness to the region in all its complexity and contradictions.”
An effort is made, however, in exploring essential, recurrent themes characterizing the region across time. Imani Perry’s essay in the exhibition catalogue defines these as: “work, love, desire, despair, and always land.”
The African American Experience In The South
Domestic workers waiting for the bus, Atlanta, Georgia, April stands as one of dozens of examples of how “A Long Arc” forwards the African American experience in the South. From the earliest portraits on view and Black troops in the Civil War to Gillian Laub’s depiction of an interracial prom in 2011 and pairings from Dawoud Bey’s iconic 2012 “Birmingham Project,” the presentation makes clear that African Americans define the South to a degree unequalled anywhere else in the nation.
The roots for this, of course, lie with slavery. The long arm of racial discrimination extends throughout “A Long Arc” from start to finish. Nowhere is it portrayed more dramatically than in the section dedicated to the Civil Rights Movement.
Through pictures and figures both familiar–police dogs and firehoses in Birmingham, Rosa Parks being fingerprinted in Montgomery, Elizabeth Eckford sneered and jeered at by white female classmates entering Central High School in Little Rock in 1957–and previously unseen, the gravity and consequences of the struggle–lest they ever be forgotten, or erased–are made fresh again.
Notice the face of the woman in Bruce Davidson’s Arrest of a Demonstrator, Birmingham, (1963).
Bruce Davidson, ‘Arrest of a Demonstrator, Birmingham,’ 1963.
©Bruce Davidson / Magnum Photos
Gordon Parks’ Ondria Tanner and Her Grandmother Window-Shopping, Mobile, Alabama (1956) shows what segregation looks like in shocking color. A picture truly being worth a thousand words.
One, after another, after another.
The South’s long arc continues.
“A Long Arc” can be seen at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond October 5, 2024, through January 26. 2025, following its presentation at the Addison Gallery.
