Excerpt

Would you talk more about creative documentary photography specific to the holding here at the High Museum? Let me start by saying that one of the things we’ve done recently was acquire major pieces by Leonard Freed and Gordon Parks. Their photographs are in the more classic documentary tradition. So, again there is this idea of relevance, and of our collection being this really important center for the study of pictures of the civil rights movement. Documentary photography and the idea of social agency, these things are very important to our collection, and so we’re growing in ways that reflect that.

So this series was created in the south? What was that like? Yes. It was the same year that Martin Parr and Kael Alford were commissioned, and each of us took a very different approach.

How does [Lucas Foglia’s] work fit into the contemporary landscape? It’s hard to define the contemporary landscape. The color documentary project is, in a way, a standard approach, or it has been for the past number of decades. This work provides the question: What is documentary photography? Because it’s not a specific narrative trying to tell you a specific story about a certain group of clearly identified people, it’s a much more general exploration of some of the broader issues. It’s looking at so many different things at once. I think artists today have a very clear understanding that pictures are fictions, but they also tell the truth.