Revelations Recent Photography Acquisitions

These photographs were added to the Ogden Museum of Southern Art’s permanent collection over the last decade.

With over 70 photographs featured, Revelations represents a wide range of processes and techniques made by a diverse group of 39 photographers.

"Revelations" celebrates regional identity in parallel with the South’s ongoing contributions to a global conversation on photography in the visual arts.

In recent years, emerging and underrepresented photographers have been a focus of the Ogden's photography exhibitions, programming and acquisitions.

The Museum purposefully acquired works in the 2018-2019 New Southern Photography groundbreaking exhibition to join its collection of established masters of the medium.

This initiative is part of the museum's ongoing effort to build comprehensive survey of process and style in Southern photography.

The permanent collection of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art began with more than 600 works of art donated by the New Orleans entrepreneur and philanthropist, Roger H. Ogden from his private collection.

Since Mr. Ogden’s original donation in 2003, the Museum’s permanent collection of paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture and photographs has grown to more than 4,000 works

Today, the Ogden Museum’s permanent collection of more than 1,500 photographs represents one of the most important and comprehensive collections of American Southern photography in the world.

With photographs dating from 1910 to 2019, Revelations represents over 110 years of photographic history.

Lewis Hine's project of photographing Ellis Island with students galvanized his recognition of the value of documentary photography in education.

Declaring that he "wanted to show things that had to be corrected," Lewis Hine was one of the earliest photographers to use the photograph as a documentary tool.

During the 1970's and 1980's, Birney Imes documented in black and white the Mississippi delta. A few years ago, the artist revisited this series of photographs and selected images he previously overlooked.

Taken during the Great Depression, this photograph can be seen as a manifestation of uncertainty and ambiguity. We do not know a lot about this man, and this photograph ask more questions that it answers.

Between 1935 and 1939, Dorothea Lange worked for the Farm Security Administration, where she made many of her best-known photographs.

As part of the same team as Dorothea Lange at the FSA, Lee's primary documented rural communities with the goal of making urban Americans aware of the plight of the rural workers stricken by drought and the Great Depression.

Little photographed through four decades the western evolution of country music from Appalachia to California. His work focuses around preserving the history of the music.

Sally Mann’s relationship with the South has shaped her work and explores how the legacy of the South—as both homeland and graveyard, refuge and battleground—continues to permeate American identity.

Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick, as husband and wife team, have been documenting Louisiana and its people for more than 25 years. They have covered religious and spiritual ceremonies throughout their community and in rural Louisiana.

Santa Barbara photographic artist Cheryl Medow creates images that entice the viewer to enter the natural world and envision her wild birds, in imaginary and real environments.

In this apocalyptical depiction of the deserted Six-Flags park of New Orleans post-Katrina, the natural world has taken over. This photograph is paradoxical - the expected movement is replaced by stillness.

Born and based in New Orleans, Frank Relle is known for his long-exposure nightscapes of the city’s beautiful architecture and landscapes.

His images often invite the viewer to slow down and to see the familiar as uncanny.

RaMell Ross work looks at his insider-outsider relationship with the historic South and considers the iconic use of the African-American body.

"I’ve lived, worked and photographed in Hale County, AL for almost 7 years. Sometimes, there, I feel like I have no race." RaMell Ross

This exhibition is curated by Richard McCabe, Ogden Museum Curator of Photography.

Host Committee
Shelby Cobb in Honor of Richard McCabe
Beverly Dale
Don & Lola Norris
Roger Ogden & Ken Barnes
Alan Rothschild
John Shubin
Charles D. Urstadt and David Bernard
Terese & William Winslow