On Curating Southern Photography | By Rebekah Jacob
As an art dealer and curator specializing in Southern images, it has been a dutiful exploration of my own heritage to exhibit photography that has captured the beautiful, sober accretion of a place geographically below the Mason-Dixon and east of Texas (inclusive, of course). I have worked to focus on photographers whose images chronicle a region that feeds our imagination and that we trust no matter what. For the curator and artist alike, numerous exhibitions are about a land of which we profess a fondness and continue to artistically explore.
From the beginning of Rebekah Jacob Gallery, photographers — such as, Eudora Welty, Dorthea Lange, Walker Evans, among others — have been essential to our curatorial program. The South at the center point of these WPA-era artists’s oeuvres, their pluralism of Southern themes becomes a poetic documentation that encompasses—and exceeds—Southern borders.
Perhaps current selections in our flat-files are a microcosm of a long, planned and unplanned road trips: images of clapboard churches, bottle trees, dilapidated structures — all waiting on someone to arrive. There are also images of bar-b-q joints whose interior decorations sparkle with white tiled walls, stuffed deer heads, ketchup bottles and checkered table cloths. These artstists’ raw, unstaged material share imagination between the photographer and viewer, spurring questions like, “Is this ‘for real’ or a movie set?’”
As a curator and broker over the past twenty years, I have been honored to sift through hundreds of thousands of images, working carefully to select photos that poignantly tell of the South, my South…our South. I mostly black/white images but color images, too, that tell of the region’s mythic terrain, African American heritage, and compulsiveness with religion (God Bless; Jesus Saves). Throughout countless projects, I am always reminded of the technical genius the artists’ concise eyes, inherent skills of knowing when to click the shutter, and undeniable patience for the subject matters. Studying these artists through their visual essays, I have come to believe that it their dedication to the medium, personal kindness, and genuine spirit that grants a fate of being at the right place at the right time.
To watch concepts doodled on a legal pad evolve into coherent, visual projects is a patient and often grueling, frustrating process. However, the labor and time of these projects always manifest themselves into a stunning selection of photography. And we at the the Rebekah Jacob Gallery hope viewers alike will experience the story of a place (below the Mason-Dixon), whose intrinsic complexities are at the root of Heritage and a place for which we are proud, no matter what.
Yours Truly (And Southern by the Grace of God):
Rebekah Jacob ; Owner and Found of the Rebekah Jacob Gallery
