Between 1973
and 1978 I spent a year and a half in Alaska where I lived and photographed in
remote Eskimo villages. On my first three trips I lived in the village of
Shungnak on the Kobuk River above the Arctic Circle and also photographed in
neighboring villages Selawik, Ambler, and Kobuk. I also made three trips to the
southern Bering Sea Coast of Alaska where I lived with Eskimo families in the
villages of Tununak and Newtok, and photographed other villages and fish camps
in the region.
Some of these photographs were first published in The
Last and First Eskimo in 1978, and exhibited at the International Center of
Photography in New York in that same year
Alex Harris was raised in the South and lives in Durham, North Carolina.
Harris has photographed extensively in the American South, New Mexico, Alaska,
and Cuba. His work is represented in major collections including The San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, The
Museum of Modern Art in New York, The High Museum of Art in Atlanta, The North
Carolina Museum of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His awards include
a Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography, a Rockefeller Foundation Humanities
Fellowship, and a Lyndhurst Prize. His photographs have been exhibited in
numerous museums including two solo exhibitions at the International Center of
Photography in New York. As a photographer and editor, Harris has published fifteen
books including River of Traps (with William deBuys) a finalist for the
Pulitzer Prize in general non-fiction. His book, The Idea of Cuba, was co-published in September of 2007 by
the University of New Mexico Press and the Center for Documentary Studies at
Duke. His most recent book, Why We Are Here, a collaboration with E.O.Wilson, was
published in 2012 by Liveright/Norton.
Harris was born in Atlanta, Georgia and grew up in the South. After
graduation from Yale in 1971, he photographed North Carolina as part of a Duke
University research project. Between 1972 and 1978 he lived and photographed in
Hispanic villages in northern New Mexico and Eskimo villages in Alaska. During
these years, Harris also began to commute to North Carolina to teach
documentary photography at Duke. In 1980 he founded the Center for Documentary
Photography at Duke, which he directed for eight years. In 1989, he was a
founder of The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke. Between 1995 and 1998 Harris launched
DoubleTake Magazine with Robert Coles and coedited the publication through its
first twelve issues. He is currently Professor of the Practice of Public Policy
and Documentary Studies at Duke. Within the Center for Documentary Studies, he
is the Creative Director of the Lewis Hine Documentary Fellows Program
All images © Alex Harris
Nessun commento:
Posta un commento