The ghosts of past centuries find undisturbed refuge in the American South from the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains down to the fertile flatlands of the Gulf Coast. For New Orleans- based photographer David Knox, the past resides in the present in many forms, land, crops, architecture, and people. In his most recent body of work, he combines historical images from the American Civil War with his own photographs to create photomontages depicting an imagined, surreal world set somewhere in the mid-19th century South. These “tableaux” weave together the disparate lives of Union and Confederate soldiers of the Civil War, freedmen and slaves, civilians and clergy. Characters in his fabled scenes and the symbols around them offer fictional narratives that represent and explore hardship, loss, survival, gender, race, class, religion, death, and resurrection. The large-scale images on display at Buckhead Library in Atlanta, USA, (informed by nineteenth-century printing processes including stereograph, tintype and wet plate collodion) explore the visual possibilities of a region that remains, in part, unwontedly bound to yesterday; where the present is as peculiar and as haunted as its past.
David Knox, Ritual and Ruin: Tableaux of a Lost War
June 14th- July 17th, 2017
Buckhead Library
269 Bulkhead Avenue NE
Atlanta, GA 30305
USA
http://www.afpls.org/buckhead-branch
