Alex Harris

Our Strange New Land

A native southerner, Alex Harris has chronicled the lives of people throughout the world, photographing in locations as disparate as the Inuit villages of Alaska, the streets of Havana, the fish markets of Mumbai, and the farms of North Carolina. In 2016, Harris began photographing a wide cross-section of independent narrative movie productions from Louisiana to Virginia with a keen eye to how the South is seen, imagined, and created by contemporary cinematic storytellers. He photographed both the scenes orchestrated for the cameras and the activity that unfolded around the set and in the adjacent communities, often blurring the lines between staged storytelling and actual life. Most of the photographs feature people—actors, crew, and onlookers—to consider how, as Harris described it, “we are all actors in our own lives, creating our sets, practicing our lines, refining our characters, performing ourselves.”

Harris photographed over forty different productions, and his pictures span nearly every genre, encompassing science fiction and horror, historical drama, crime thrillers, and romantic comedy. With the diverse topography of the South as a backdrop, his impeccably lit and meticulously composed images stirringly reveal how the current wave of independent filmmaking mirrors the preoccupations and concerns present in broader American society, such as violence and racial tension, but also the joy and levity that come from deep personal and communal bonds.

Taking advantage of the creative latitude provided by the commission, Harris also made his first foray into filmmaking and created a three-channel video installation composed of some two hundred images from the project and accompanied by a newly commissioned score and sound appropriated from the films he photographed. The video was first displayed alongside a selection of prints at the High in 2019, and a related book will be published in the fall of 2021.

View all works in the commission.