Yoffy Press – förlag

The American South has become a nexus of film production in the United States. By 2016, more major features were being shot in Georgia than in California. Commissioned by the High Museum in Atlanta as part of their Picturing the South series, Alex Harris explored cinematic representations of the South by visiting and photographing the making of over 40 independent fiction films across the region. Using a documentary approach to capture scenes that unfolded on or around the set, Harris’ images tell the story of a new South while also hinting at more universal aspects of life – the ways in which we are all actors in our own lives, creating our sets, practicing our lines, refining our characters, playing ourselves. These photographs also tell a story about our increasingly visual culture and explore the rapidly evolving world of independent filmmaking, one that is little known to audiences outside the film festival circuit.

What can be more inspiring and resilient than listening to a five-year-old girl who spent her life until then struggling with severe multiple food allergies, saying that when she couldn’t eat strawberries, she pretended that watermelons were strawberries? Moments like this kept Sandra Bacchi strong and positive while facing the shadows that came to the surface when she became a mother.Watermelons Are Not Strawberries is a photographic memoir about the ups and downs of parenting and the surprising lessons about acceptance and healing we can learn from our children. The visual experience of moving from chaos to clarity is both vulnerable and relatable, giving the viewer a window into what it means to find peace and a little bit of hope.

a photographic survey of an emergent cybernetic landscapeShot in a variety of locations– ranging from the political spectacle of Washington D.C. to the National Radio Quiet Zone in rural West Virginia– Wilderness of Mirrors visualizes contemporary mechanisms of control that employ technology, anxiety, and images as a means to destabilize and restructure belief.Through diverse modes of image-making, the sequence unveils discrete social and technological systems which are embedded into the fabric of everyday life and serve to reinforce and advance dominant structures of capital and power.The series presents these conditions as a veritable wilderness– a landscape of images and devices that infinitely deflects, replicates, and distorts any information within its borders. These devices fuel a hyper-partisan fervor and virulent strains of misinformation, all against a backdrop of psychographic advertising and domestic mass-surveillance.By guiding the viewer through these absurd surfaces and circumstances, the images allude to the ways our perception is quietly directed and managed via algorithm to the benefit of corporate interests and intelligence organizations.Ultimately, Wilderness of Mirrors aspires to locate the intersections of simulation, power, and concealment in order to disentangle the mesh of our personal, political and digital selves; it describes an urgent need to reclaim the agency we have lost to convenience and abstraction. The work seeks to question default realities and reframe our relationship to this digital landscape, before it is completely determined for us.