Mark Steinmetz

ATL

Since the early 1990s when he moved to Athens, Georgia, Mark Steinmetz has worked with handheld cameras and traditional black-and-white materials to create lyrical photographs that capture the distinctive character of the South’s people and the peculiar beauty of its built environment. Because of his improvisational approach to recording public life, he could easily be classified as a street photographer, but Steinmetz is a connoisseur of the margins and the in-between, omnivorously photographing a range of far-flung byways from the rural to the central city.

Steinmetz received his commission in 2015 and spent the next two years photographing in, around, and above Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, a location he had photographed many times while coming and going on his own travels. With the world’s most heavily trafficked airport as his home base, he closely considered the activity and interactions that take place at this crossroads of the contemporary South. He was particularly masterful at capturing the ordinary-yet-fascinating human dramas that play out in a decidedly liminal public place. His subjects displayed a range of emotions—boredom, frustration, contemplation, sadness, joy—which he wove together in an affecting display of everyday experiences in transit. “I want to photograph the depth of people, their inner life,” he said. “I like the idea of a quiet interlude in a crowded place.”

To punctuate these human moments, Steinmetz also created atmospheric studies of the airport’s grounds and the surrounding environs. His photographs lend a poignant perspective to how this gateway to the wider world is a place of delightful paradoxes: a massive modern complex sitting in the midst of a sublime natural environment; a bustling global transit hub as the site of solitary individual experiences; and a stifling bureaucratic tangle as a portal to possibility and opportunity.

Steinmetz’s commission was first shown at the High in 2018 in the exhibition Terminus.

View all works in the commission.