Our Strange New Land - Photographs by Alex Harris
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
Hardcover, 10.325 x 8.5 inches
144 pages
Edition of 500
Presale Offerings
The first 50 copies will include a signed 8x10 print of this iconic image from the project, photographed by Harris in South Carolina on the set of Roni Nicole Henderson-Day’s film, And the People Could Fly.
“The one shot that really got me hooked on this project is a nighttime shot of a young woman. She’s in the doorway of a screened in porch, leaning against the doorway, smoking a cigarette. And she’s kind of lost in this interior moment of thought. The lighting is just unbelievable; it really amplifies the mood of the picture. And then [if you] scan it a little bit, kind of coming out of the shadows, you can see a set light that’s creating it.
That one picture just allows you to get stuck in between those moments. Because, in one sense he is recording the reality of that moment as it happened. But it is a moment that was, in a lot of ways, staged. As someone who’s really fascinated by photography and the ways that it helps us relate to the world, it kind of makes my head spin a little bit. I never get tired of looking at it.”
- Greg Harris, High Museum of Art Curator of Photography
Anticipated release January 2021
Photographs by Leonardo Magrelli
Essays by Brit Salvesen and Mirjam Kooiman
Hardcover, 9 x 6.5 inches
80 pages
Edition of 400
ISBN: 978-1-949608-25-0
Trade Edition: $35.00
Pre-sale runs through December 31
About Leonardo Magrelli
Born in Rome in 1989, Leonardo Magrelli holds a BA in Design and Architecture from “La Sapienza” university in Rome. In 2010, he began collaborating with Rome’s International Photography Festival and with the photography publishing house, Punctum Press. In 2014, he began primarily focusing on his own personal work. His works have been published in several printed and online photography magazines, and they have been displayed in collective exhibitions and festivals. In 2017, he became part of the collective, Vaste Programme, together with Giulia Vigna and Alessandro Tini.