The week was consumed with photography.
About 18 months ago, I contacted Alan Rothschild, who as trustee of a charitable foundation in Columbus, Georgia, has amassed a collection of more than 700 photographs taken in the South since World War II.
The collection is called the Do Good Fund.
One of the missions of the fund is to make high quality photography available to communities that otherwise might not have access to such. Small towns like ours and university galleries.
My request to Alan was that the fund lend photographs for two concurrent shows, one at the Rosenzweig Center downtown and the other at MUW art gallery.
The two venues would provide more gallery space and perhaps facilitate some cross-pollination between the community and The W, i.e. W students would come downtown to see the exhibit at the RAC and locals would go on campus for the complementary exhibit.
Alan was delighted with the idea and said yes.
The collection, the work of 105 photographers, contains photographs made during the civil rights struggle; there are photographs from the heart of coal country; from the tobacco region of North Carolina. There are explorations of race and gender by young, urban photographers.
The photographs are compelling, challenging and often provocative.
We are used to seeing photographs of the agrarian South; less familiar to us, to me at least, are younger urban-based Southern photographers who examine issues of race, gender and sexuality. We decided on the title, “The South: Then and Now.” The “Then” exhibit would hang at the RAC and the “Now” pictures at MUW.
And so it was on a rainy Monday, I set out from Columbus in one of Bobby Watkins’ U-Haul vans bound for Columbus, Georgia.
My first impression of Columbus was the Chattahoochee River with its impressive white-water rapids at the edge of downtown. The river serves as the border here between Georgia and Alabama, between Columbus and its once-scruffy neighbor Phenix City, Alabama.
Columbus was once a mill town. It appears as though some fairy flitted through, waved her wand and converted the immense brick edifices that once housed looms, spinning jennies, water wheels and steam engines into chic condominiums and luxe hotels.
Phenix City in the 1940s and 1950s was a haven for organized crime, prostitution, and gambling. With the Army training base across the river at Fort Benning, there was no shortage of clients.
Late Monday afternoon in a misting rain, Alan, gallery outreach coordinator Eliza Daffin and I, feeling like we were playing an oversized game of Jenga, somehow fitted just over a hundred framed photographs into the van.
Thanks to the good work of Shane Kinder at the Arts Council, MUW gallery director Beverly Joyce and her gallery assistant Chu-Ping Wang at The W, the photographs are on the wall and ready to be seen.
The MUW gallery is open 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday and the RAC is open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Saturday.
Photography of this caliber does not show up in these parts often. I hope you will take advantage of the opportunity to see it.
Birney Imes ([email protected]) is the former publisher of The Dispatch.
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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