For two decades Bill Bamberger has been photographing American and the rhythms of their daily lives. His photographs have appeared in Aperture, DoubleTake, and the New York Times Magazine. He has appeared as a featured guest on CBS Sunday Morning, About Books (CSPAN2), and North Carolina People with William Friday. His book, Closing: The Life and Death of an American Factory (DoubleTake Books/Norton, 1998; text by Cathy Davidson), won the Mayflower Prize in Nonfiction and was a semifinalist for the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award.

Bamberger’s work explores large social issues of our time: the demise of the American factory, housing in America, adolescents coming of age. A trademark of Bamberger’s exhibitions is that they are first shown in the community where he has chosen to photograph prior to their museum exhibition. Closing: The Life and Death of an American Factory premiered in an abandoned department store a block from the closed furniture factory, while Stories from Home was first shown in a custom-designed 1,000 square foot mobile art gallery on San Antonio’s Mexican-American West Side.

Bamberger has had one-person exhibitions at the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, and the Yale University Art Gallery. He is one of fifty-six American artists to participate in Artists and Communities: America Creates for the Millennium, the National Endowment for the Arts millennium project. Stories of Home, an exhibition about the importance of home ownership in the lives of families and neighborhoods, showed at the National Building Museum from December 4, 2003 through March 7, 2004.

Bamberger, a Morehead Scholar, earned a B.A. with honors from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He lives in Mebane, North Carolina.

Alex Harris was born in Atlanta, Georgia and grew up in the South. After graduation from Yale University in 1971, he photographed North Carolina as part of a Duke University research project. Between 1972 and 1978 he photographed extensively in New Mexico and Alaska. During these years, Harris also began to commute to North Carolina to teach documentary photography at Duke. In 1980 he founded the Center for Documentary Photography at Duke, which he directed for eight years. In 1989, he became a founding member of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke. In 1995 Harris and Robert Coles launched a new national magazine DoubleTake, and Harris co-edited the magazine through its first twelve issues. He is currently Professor of the Practice of Public Policy and Documentary Studies at Duke. Within the Center for Documentary Studies, he is Director of the Lewis Hine Documentary Fellows Program.

Harris has exhibited widely, with photographs included in group exhibitions (since 2000) at the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, the International Center of Photography in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, the Davis Museum of Wellesley College, and the Sheldon Art Galleries in St. Louis. In the fall of 2006, his work was included in the J. Paul Getty exhibition and catalogue Where We Live: Photographs of America from the Berman Collection. Harris has had solo exhibitions at the Valencian Museum of Modern Art in Valencia, Spain, the Addison Gallery of American Art, the US Sentae Russell Rotunda, and two solo exhibitions at the International Center of Photography in New York.

Harris’s photographs are in numerous private and corporate collections and museum collections, including: the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the North Carolina Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Addison Gallery of Contemporary Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Valencian Museum of Modern Art, and the High Museum of Art.

Harris’s photographs have been published in Photographers, Writers, and the American Scene: Visions of Passage (2002), Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American South (2003), and The Cuba Reader (2004). Harris has also published six books of his photographs. With Robert Coles he published The Old Ones of New Mexico (UNM Press 1973), and The Last and First Eskimos (New York Graphic Society 1978). River of Traps (UNM Press 1990), his book with writer William deBuys, was a 1991 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in general non-fiction. His next, Red White Blue and God Bless You, was published in 1992 by UNM Press. Harris’s black-and-white portraits were published in 1998 in Old and On Their Own (W.W. Norton) with text by Robert Coles and additional photographs by Thomas Roma. In 2000, Islas En El Tiempo, a retrospective book on his work in New Mexico and Cuba, was published by the Valencian Museum of Modern Art (IVAM). His book, The Idea of Cuba, was published in the fall of 2007 by the University of New Mexico Press and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University in association with a traveling exhibition of his Cuba photographs. As an editor, Harris has published: Gertrude Blom: Bearing Witness (UNC Press 1982) with Margaret Sartor, A World Unsuspected: Portraits of Southern Childhood (UNC Press 1985), In the Streets by Helen Levitt (Duke University Press 1988), Beyond the Barricades: Popular Resistance in South Africa (Aperture 1989), A New Life: Stories and Photographs from the Suburban South (Norton 1996) and Arrivals and Departures: The Airport Pictures of Garry Winogrand (DAP 2004) with Lee Friedlander.

Harris’s awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography, a N.C. Visual Artist Fellowship from the NEA, and a Lyndhurst Award. He is married to Margaret Sartor and they have a son and a daughter.

PHOTOGRAPHS OF EDNA LEWIS

John T. Hill on his work with Edna Lewis:

"Edna Lewis and I met in early 1971 when I had been asked to make a portrait for the cover of her first cookbook, The Edna Lewis Cookbook.  

In spite of a natural shyness, Edna’s body language and soft voice projected a confidence and composure that could not be denied. As foretold by her middle name, Regina, she possessed a truly royal presence. It was my good fortune, and my family’s, to know her as a friend.

For over ten years I attempted to capture on film something of her warmth and wit. It is a pleasure to see that she continues to receive appreciation as a chef and as an inspiration.”

John T. Hill is a photographer, designer and writer. Hill was the first director of graduate studies in photography at Yale University, where he became a friend and colleague of Walker Evans, and eventually became the executor of Evans’ estate. He has published six books including Walker Evans: Depth of Field; Walker Evans: First and Last; Walker Evans at Work; Walker Evans: Havana 1933; Walker Evans: The Hungry Eye, awarded the Prix Nadar (Paris) and a Kraszna-Krausz Book Award (London); and Walker Evans: Lyric Documentary. 


WALKER EVANS PHOTOGRAPHS

Walker Evans (1903–1975) has been called the most important American artist of his time. In 2002, after an extended period of experimentation, John T. Hill began to offer limited edition prints of Evans' photographs using the latest digital technology to produce prints he felt did credit to Evans, the subjects, and their own sensibility. These prints—a continuing appreciation of Evans' contribution to twentieth century art—have been exhibited internationally.

John T. Hill Editions is dedicated to making prints that faithfully interpret the artist's original work. A photographer himself, and having had a close relationship with Evans, Hill has a deeply-informed understanding of Evans’ aesthetic and of his photography. His portfolios include large-scale prints of some of Evans’ most important work. Details, rarely appreciated before, come alive in these scrupulous translations of Evans’ photographs.

 

Margaret Sartor is a photographer, writer, and research associate at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.

Her photographs have appeared in a number of periodicals and books, including Aperture, DoubleTake, Esquire, Harper’s, The New Yorker, the Oxford American, Washington Post Sunday Magazine, In Their Mother’s Eyes edited by Martina Mettner, Black: A Celebration of Culture edited by Deborah Willis, The Spirit of Family by Al and Tipper Gore, and A New Life: Stories and Photographs from the Suburban South edited by Alex Harris and Alice George. Her prints have been exhibited widely, including at the Burden Gallery (NYC), the SoHo Photo Gallery, OPSIS Gallery (NYC), the Center for Photography at Woodstock, the New Orleans Museum of Art, and the North Carolina Museum of Art. Her photographs are in many private museum collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Mead Art Museum, Birmingham Museum of Art, New Orleans Museum of Art, and the North Carolina Museum of Art.

Sartor is editor of several books and has written magazine articles on photography, including Gertrude Blom: Bearing Witness, which was edited with Alex Harris, and What Was Told: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney, which was edited with Geoff Dyer and chosen as one of the top ten photography books of 1999 by the Village Voice. As a photography curator, her exhibitions include: “People of the Forest: The Photographs of Gertrude Blom,” curated with Alex Harris at the International Center for Photography in New York, and “Short Distances and Definite Places: The Photographs of William Gedney,” curated with Sandra Philips at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Margaret Sartor’s most recent book is a memoir. Miss American Pie: A Diary of Love, Secrets, and Growing Up in the 1970s was published by Bloombury in July 2006. For more information about this book, which has received rave reviews across the country, please visit margaretsartor.com.

ARTIST STATEMENT: PHOTOGRAPHS FROM THE SERIES, "CLOSE TO HOME"

Family portraiture has long served the function of preserving memory, of making transitory experience into something that can be handed down or carried with us, providing a shield against time, a salve for lost. Beauty and wonder are easily found in the strange and the far away, but the deepest, and perhaps most fragile, beauty often lies in the faces that are literally the most familiar and the lives to which we are bound by history, blood, and love.

I began this series of photographs of my family and hometown in the late 1980s, soon after the unexpected death of my father. Like many Southerners, I was brought up with the belief that moving forward in life requires looking back, back towards home, that laser point on the horizon by which one learns to clarify the angles and shapes of any new experience. We call it Proper Perspective.

As a photographer, I found my home by returning to the backyards and levees of my childhood in Louisiana, by observing the world I have known and watched for as long as as I can remember. In the beginning, I was more interested in the manifestations than the mysteries of home, intent on a scrutiny that might provide an explanation for my grief. Gradually, I began to understand that to see clearly, it is often important to remain in the darkness of not-knowing. Writing, for me, is a similar process, driven more by instinct than ideas. This is particularly true of my memoir, Miss American Pie: A Diary of Love, Secrets, and Growing Up in the 1970s, which explores the same emotional and geographic territory as these photographs.

John Berger wrote, “Events are always at hand. But the coherence of these events—which is what one means by reality—is an imaginative construction.” A diary or a memoir is an imaginative and subjective construction of real events, as is a series of photographs. No matter the path I pursue in my work, it is always the relationship to my family that shapes and defines my particular perspective. For me, all roads being and end close to home.

Larry Schwarm’s photographs have been exhibited widely across the United States over the past twenty years, both in solo and group shows. They have appeared in various publications, including An American Century of Photography: From Dry-Plate to Digital, Between Home and Heaven: Contemporary American Landscape Photography, Harper’s Magazine, and Blind Spot. His work is in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Milwaukee Museum of Art, Beach Museum of Art (Manhattan, Kansas), and Spencer Museum of Art (Lawrence, Kansas), and is included in the PaineWebber Landscape Collection and Hallmark Photographic Collections. Schwarm’s recent traveling solo show, Greenburg After the Storm, was organized by the Ulrich Museum of Art at Wichita State University.

Christopher Sims was born in Michigan and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. He has an undergraduate degree in history from Duke University, a master’s degree in visual communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a M.F.A. in studio art from the Maryland Institute College of Art. He worked as a photo archivist at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. and currently is the Undergraduate Education Director at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.

His recent exhibitions include shows at the Griffin Museum of Photography, the Houston Center for Photography, the Light Factory, the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, and the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art. His project on Guantanamo Bay was featured in The Washington Post, the BBC World Service, Roll Call, and Flavorwire. He was selected as the recipient of the Baum Award for Emerging American Photographers in 2010, named one of the "new Superstars of Southern Art by the Oxford American magazine in 2012, and was awarded the Arte Laguna Prize in Photographic Art in 2015.