Organized by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, “A Long Arc” is the first major survey of Southern photography in the new millennium.
Joel Sternfeld’s Domestic workers waiting for the bus, Atlanta, Georgia, April, (1983) might be the most mundane of nearly 200 photographs on view in “A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845.” Three Black women (domestic workers) stand in the street (waiting for the bus) of an otherwise empty neighborhood (Atlanta).
Amidst the pictures of war and poverty and protest and violence and German Shepherd’s and Martin Luther King being arrested, there’s no particular reason to be stopped in your tracks by this wholly banal scene. Unless you’ve been there, as I have.
The picture’s title refers to Atlanta, I’d place this as a particular neighborhood in the suburban community of Sandy Springs, where I once lived. If I haven’t been on this exact street, perhaps even in one of these homes, I’ve been within a half mile of it.
That was more like 2003, but whether 1983, 2003, or 2023, I would be willing to bet a dollar to a donut–to use a Southern phrase–the street looks exactly the same today. Lawns uniformly closely clipped. Pine straw covering the landscaping. Everything just so.
Order. Conformity. Genteel. Southern.
There’s no need for a “white’s only” sign, it’s implied.
The women employed dusting and polishing inside the brick mansions wait on the bus because they can’t afford to own a car. I can assure you no one living in any of the houses along the street would be caught dead riding the bus in Atlanta–or even know how to. It’s just not done.
They drive cars. Nice ones. Big SUVs and European sedans.
This is an image of white privilege.
The picture speaks to America’s structural racism and its racial wealth gap with a whisper, not a scream. Doing so reveals how it’s not just the racist sheriffs and brutes who poured milkshakes over the head of sit-in protesters at the Woolworth’s counter back in the day who are complicit in those systems. Doing so reminds us that the struggle for equality extends beyond the dramatic. Beyond the Edmond Pettis Bridge in Selma, or the bus boycotts in Montgomery.
It reminds us that we all play a part, often in ways we don’t even recognize.
Domestic workers waiting for the bus, Atlanta, Georgia, April can be seen at the Addison Gallery of American Art on the campus of Phillips Academy in Andover, MA as part of “A Long Arc” through July 31, 2024.‘Dwelling in the Muck’
Organized by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, “A Long Arc” is the first major survey of Southern photography in the new millennium. Beginning with pictures from the dawn of photography in the Antebellum South of the 1840s through the Civil War, Great Depression, Civil Rights and through to the 2000s, the exhibition both reveals the South’s critical impact on the evolution of American photography and examines the region’s complex history.
