Alex Harris: Our Strange New Land – LENSCRATCH

Alex Harris’ new book, Our Strange New Land (co-edited with Margaret Sartor), looks to reframe the question “How do you tell the story of the American South?” Based in Durham, North Carolina, Harris knows it’s a region with a complicated history; a legacy marred by hatefulness and prejudice. But it’s also the home of the Blues and folk and Country music. Of Eudora Welty and William Faulkner, Po’ Boys and hush puppies. In Harris’ work, there is a modern light cast on the historical shadow of the Southern story, one that shines through the people who live there. Photographing on the sets of forty-two independent films depicting the South, Harris used the “make-believe land” of a film set to reimagine how the American South might be rendered.