Havana 1998

GameBoy 2000

In this exhibition, Alex Harris juxtaposes two groups of seemingly disparate color images - a series of Havana views seen through the windshields of aging American automobiles and a series of American landscapes seen in the context of a boy's electronic game - to explore the potential of the photographer's eye and the camera's frame to both limit and expand our view of the world. In each series of photographs there are other frames - both literal and metaphoric - that illuminate the past or point to the future, adding to the complexity of the images.

Alex Harris is a Professor of the Practice of Public Policy Studies at Duke and a founder of the Center for Documentary Studies. He has taught at Duke since 1975. His photographs of the American South and Southwest, of Alaska and Cuba, and of his own family, are part of the larger collection of documentary photography in the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library (RBMSCL).

RBMSCL is committed to identifying and acquiring photographic collections that have artistic merit and that reflect the visionary purpose and documentary impulse of the photographer who created them. Both the exhibit and the gallery in which it is displayed reflect a goal of the Library to share its wealth of photographic materials with the student body, researchers, and the general public.

For more information on photographs by Alex Harris visit Ann Stewart Fine Art.
www.alex-harris.com