ATLANTA, GEORGIA.- Diverse Works: Photographs from the High’s Collection showcases photographs from the High Museum’s permanent collection, featuring recent acquisitions and rarely exhibited works. The works of eight contemporary American photographers, including Ralph Gibson, James E. Hinton, Robert Glenn Ketchum, Mark Klett, Nancy Marshall, Todd Walker, Alex Webb and Angela West, are displayed with special attention to the development of each artist’s own style. Diverse Works is organized by the High Museum of Art and curated by Thomas Southall and Elizabeth Hartley. The show runs through August 31, 2002 at the High Museum of Art’s Folk Art and Photography Galleries.

According to Thomas Southall, Curator of Photography for the High Museum of Art, ’The exhibition realizes one of the High’s goals for its photography collection, which is to develop a collection of photographs that represents the range and development of an artist’s work over time. Each photographer is represented by a series or group of works to highlight his or her distinctive concerns.’ A selection of James Hinton’s photographs, from a sixty-six print collection recently donated by Jan and Warren Adelson, captures the African American scene in Chicago and New York in the 1960s. His dramatic black-and-white photographs of political demonstrations, performers, and children playing can be compared to Alex Webb’s shadowed and mysterious color images of the people and streets of Atlanta during the 1996 Olympics. Angela West’s private photographs of her father’s routine activities around his home provide a counterpoint to these views of dynamic urban life.



Different approaches to landscape photography are demonstrated in Robert Glenn Ketchum’s luminescent color photographs of lush, untouched wilderness compared with Mark Klett’s photographs of the desert Southwest, which prominently feature the presence of ancient and contemporary civilizations. In contrast to the large-scale dramatic work of Klett and Ketchum, Nancy Marshall’s small, delicate platinum prints reflect her intimate approach to the landscape of her native Georgia.



The value of viewing photographs in groups and series is especially evident in the work of noted bookmakers Ralph Gibson and Todd Walker. Gibson’s photographs of a hand holding a pen, eyes reflected in a car mirror, a detail of a simple white line in the street are disorienting fragments that suggest a dreamlike, poetic narrative. Walker is represented in this exhibition by a series of books that demonstrate his experimentation with sequencing images and combining pictures and text.