From the desk where I write this, in my house in the Cabbagetown neighborhood of downtown Atlanta, I could toss a hunk of Georgia red clay and hit the bungalow where the actor Jason Momoa was rumored to have lived while shooting “The Red Road,” a discontinued TV series set in the fictional town of Walpole, New Jersey. That house sits beside a former field where a façade was erected, in 2013, to shoot a scene set in Rhode Island for the movie “Dumb and Dumber To.” Around the same time, a casting director spotted a friend of mine—a lawyer, not an actor—walking his dog. This friend, who can grow a great mustache, ended up in “Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues.” That film was also shot here, although its drama takes place in San Diego and New York. Not that all the productions based nearby have depicted other places: Donald Glover’s show “Atlanta,” on FX, is mainly shot in and around town. The famous “Teddy Perkins” episode, from Season 2, was filmed, it turns out, in the same mansion that was depicted, three decades ago, as a retirement home at the end of “Driving Miss Daisy,” which also was set in Atlanta.
Over the past decade, Georgia has become known as “the Hollywood of the South.” According to numbers published last year, it hosts more feature-film productions than any other U.S. state and is ranked No. 2 internationally, second only to the entire country of Canada. Generous tax incentives offered to productions by the local government have had much to do with this, but so has the state’s unusual variety of settings: mountain, coast, island, big city, country town, and what bills itself as “the Southeast’s finest Bavarian village.” (This odd place, Helen, Georgia, also appears in “Atlanta.”) The photographer Alex Harris, who is based in Durham, North Carolina—where he has taught documentary photography at Duke University—has been grappling with the interplay between production sets and physical locations in his recent project, “Our Strange New Land,” which is on display at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art. The show is part of the museum’s “Picturing the South” project, which has been commissioning artists to create “new perspectives on the South’s social and geographical landscapes.”
Like his mentor Walker Evans, whom he studied under at Yale University, Harris, in his books and exhibitions featuring such places as Alaska, northern New Mexico, and the American South, has honed in on what he has called “the mystery in what seemed so ordinary.” Speaking about a documentary project called “The Idea of Cuba,” published as a book in 2007, Harris told an interviewer, “There’s a kind of a hyperrealism there and a kind of surrealism there. I think these pictures make us think, O.K., this is reality. And then, in another second, you look at it and you think, You know, this is something a little bit surreal and strange. It gets you to look at it and look at it again.”
The same can be said of his latest collection of images, which capture both the real and imagined places seen in films. Its genesis goes back more than a decade. In 2007, Harris was invited to the set of Steven Soderbergh’s bio-pic “Che,” shot in Mexico, where he first became interested in the sometimes strange relationship between set and setting. Later, he decided to shoot on the sets of independent films made in the American South. In the resulting images, we sometimes see the equipment and people involved in “offscreen” filming in the foreground—a camera’s viewfinder, a bright set light, a key grip or gaffer—and the film’s action behind it. Other times, we see images of the filmed action itself—a woman smoking contemplatively on a porch, a boy straddling a tree, sunrise over a bunch of bales of hay. Are these documentary-style stills from the productions that Harris visits or new and “natural” scenes unto themselves?
In an especially striking image, we see a ladder being used to create a shot. A cameraman stands atop it, while two assistants stand below. Behind them, echoing the shape of the ladder, there is the steeple of an old white church pointing up toward a leaden sky. It’s ideal light for filming—ut what is being captured and what is being missed? The camera points away from the church, and the filmmakers are all staring intently at its lens, at work on creating an unseen fiction that stands apart from the reality around them.
In another powerful image, a black police officer argues intensely with a white officer, who has his hand on his gun. The two are framed, as the focal point of the image, by the outstretched arms and equipment of the men who are filming them. The cops here bring to mind the especially painful intertwined histories of race and law enforcement in the South. Yet the scene is a doubly staged moment of conflict—a picture of another picture being made in a region, and a country, that has not yet been able to fully make sense of, or prevent, scenes of the real thing.
