Alex Harris

The exhibition includes a selection of Alex Harris’s early photographs, together with work published in the book Red White Blue and God Bless You, and his most recent photographs, not previously presented, in which he uses colour to show his way of seeing the city of Havana. Alex Harris is one of the directors of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, North Carolina, and also one of its founding members, and he has published books which include The Old Ones of New Mexico and River of Traps, the latter of which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The towns and villages of the Sangre de Cristo mountains are the quintessence of the communities of the Hispanic South-West. They are places where the traditional culture survives, if not intact then at least in its most important aspects. What remains of it has not been preserved to attract tourism. Frequently, alongside the dominant culture, elements emerge which are profoundly linked with the people’s traditional roots. During the last two decades Alex Harris has photographed dozens of communities in the area around his home in the north of New Mexico. Bounded to the north and east by the mountains of Picuris and Mora Valley and to the south and west by Glorieta Mesa and the Río Grande, this region has become an island, both literally and metaphorically. Whereas the tendencies prevailing in North America have swept away all around them, this isolated high plateau goes on growing with great pride, and sometimes defiance, despite the dominant trends. Alex Harris’s first work in the north of New Mexico consisted of an extensive series of portraits in black and white of the Hispanic inhabitants. Some of those photographs were published in The Old Ones of New Mexico (1973), produced in collaboration with Robert Coles, and in River of Traps (1990), with the collaboration of William deBuys, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1991. A selection of those photographs in black and white is now exhibited for the first time, together with other pictures that have not been seen before. Most of the exhibition is taken up by Alex Harris’s work in colour, an extension of his portrait work, where people as such do not appear but rather the inhabitants are reflected in an intimate portrait of the world that they inhabit or helped to create. During the last decade, in an effort bordering on the compulsive, Harris has carried with him his large-format camera, heavy tripod, lamps, lenses and colour film stock, taking photographs in townships and in fields, from the back seats of cars, outside houses or inside rooms. In his landscapes and interiors he has captured something impossible to capture in any individual portrait. On some occasions he has documented, with striking beauty, the presence of an entire population in its specific place on this planet. The exhibition includes a selection of Harris’s most recent work, not previously seen, a series of large-format colour photographs taken in Havana in 1998. In this work he continues to explore and develop the idea first introduced in his early photographs of cars in New Mexico. Harris juxtaposes the image of the car with what is seen through the windscreen, so that the viewer sees images of both the old and the new Cuba, framed by vintage cars from the USA. Looking at these photographs, it is as if we are literally seated behind the driver, discovering a visual route. Alex Harris (Atlanta, Georgia, 1949) graduated in psychology at Yale University in 1971, and that year he produced his first photographic reports about immigrants in the rural areas of North Carolina. Those pictures were published in the book I Shall Save One Land Unvisited in 1978. He then moved to the north of New Mexico, where he took the photographs that appeared in The Old Ones of New Mexico (1973), a book produced in collaboration with Robert Coles. This collaboration continued in his next work, The Last and First Eskimos (1978), photographs taken in the Eskimo villages of Alaska. In 1979 he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to take a series of colour photographs of the north of New Mexico, which he exhibited at the Festival of Arles in 1981. He was appointed as director of the Center for Documentary Photography at Duke University in 1980, a position that he held until 1988. Between 1982 and 1984, with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, he produced numerous reports on the north of New Mexico, which he published with the title The Essential Landscape (1985). During the latter part of the eighties, Alex Harris continued photographing the territories of the south of the United States. In this work, for which he received the Lyndhurst Prize, he used both colour and black and white, and he employed this technique in his documentary series on the life of the Hispanic country workingman Jacobo Romero, a series begun in 1975, continued in 1980 and completed in 1987. A founding member of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University in 1989, he has been on its Board of Directors since 1996. In the early nineties he prepared the texts and selected the pictures for two further publications: River of Traps (1990), in collaboration with William deBuys, and Red White Blue and God Bless You (1992), a selection of his colour photographs of the north of New Mexico taken between 1979 and 1988. He then began a new series in collaboration with Robert Coles for a book on old people living alone, and in 1993 he founded the publishing company DoubleTake Books and the magazine DoubleTake Magazine, of which he was the editor until 1997 and in which he published photographic series about contemporary relations in the nineties. The projects that he has embarked on since 1995 include the preparation of a book with Lee Friedlander about Garry Winogrand’s airport photographs and the publication of Old and On Their Own (1998) with Robert Coles and Thomas Roma. His photographs are in the collections of major museums and institutions such as The Metropolitan Museum and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The High Museum of Art in Atlanta, The Georgia Power Company, Corporate Collection, and The University of Alaska Museum in Fairbanks.