Vision, Language, and Influence: Photographs of the South

Vision, Language, and Influence brings together for the first time the work of three photographers of the American South over a 50-year period.

Walker Evans (1903-1975) is represented by incisive images of Alabama sharecroppers stemming from his epic collaboration with James Agee on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Eudora Welty (1909-2001) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning Southern writer and photographer who traveled across Mississippi in the 1930s and early 1940s taking photographs and documenting rural and small-town life in her home state. Baldwin Lee (born 1951) is a professor of photography at the University of Tennessee, and a former assistant to Walker Evans. Complementing the 50 or so works by Evans and Welty are more than 30 of Lee’s images of African-American life in the South taken during the 1980s with the support of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Vision, Language, and Influence was organized by the Knoxville Museum of Art in collaboration with Baldwin Lee.

Check out more exhibit images here.