About
Gillian Laub (b.1975, raised in Chappaqua, New York) is a photographer and filmmaker based in New York. She graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a degree in comparative literature before studying photography at the International Center of Photography, where her love of visual storytelling and family narratives began.
About
Gillian Laub (b.1975, raised in Chappaqua, New York) is a photographer and filmmaker based in New York. She graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a degree in comparative literature before studying photography at the International Center of Photography, where her love of visual storytelling and family narratives began.
Laub’s first monograph, Testimony (Aperture 2007), began as a response to the media coverage during the second intifada in the Middle East. This work is comprised of portraits and testimonies from Israeli Jews, Israeli Arabs, Lebanese, and Palestinians all directly and indirectly affected by the conflict.
Laub spent over a decade working in Georgia exploring issues of lingering racism in the American South. This work became Laub’s first feature length, directed and produced, documentary film, Southern Rites that premiered on HBO. Her monograph, Southern Rites (Damiani, 2015) and travelling exhibition by the same title came out in conjunction with the film and are being used for an educational outreach campaign, in schools and institutions across the country. Southern Rites was named one of the best photo books by TIME, Smithsonian, Vogue, LensCulture, and American Photo. It was also nominated for a Lucie award and Humanitas award.
"Riveting...In a calm, understated tone, Southern Rites digs deep to expose the roots that have made segregated proms and other affronts possible. Southern Rites is a portrait of the inequities that lead to disaster on the streets of cities like Baltimore and Ferguson, Mo.” - The New York Times
Gillian’s most recent monograph Family Matters (Aperture), spanning over twenty years of photographs, explores how society’s biggest questions are revealed in our most intimate relationships; zeroing in on the artist family as an example of the way Donald Trump’s knack for sowing discord and division had impacted communities, individuals, and households across the country. An exhibition of Family Matters opened at the International Center of Photography in conjunction with the publication.
Laub recently recieved the Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was honored as a NYSCA/NYFA Photography Fellow in 2019.
Laub has been interviewed on The View, NPR, CNN, MSNBC, Good Morning America, Times Talks and numerous others. Laub contributes to many publications including TIME , The New York Times Magazine and Vanity Fair. Laub’s work has been widely collected and exhibited, and is included in the collects of the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge MA; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Terrana Collection, Boston; Jewish Museum. New York; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC (now American University Museum Collection in Washington, DC), and a wide range of corporate and private collections.
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Oct 05, 2024 Jan 26, 2025
A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts200 North Arthur Ashe BoulevardRichmond, VA, 23220United StatesTake an epic journey through the American South from 1845 to today. In A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845, presented at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, encounter the everyday lives and ordinary places captured in evocative photos that contemplate the region’s central role in shaping American history and identity and its critical impact on the development of photography. This is the first major exhibition in more than 25 years to explore the full history of photography in and about the South.
A Long Arc explores the American South’s distinct, evolving, and contradictory character through an examination of photography and how photographers working in the region have reckoned with the South’s fraught history and posed urgent questions about American identity. Organized chronologically, the exhibition traces the South’s shifting identity in more than two hundred photographs made over more than 175 years.
The exhibition’s individual sections delve into the themes of photography before, during, and after the Civil War; documentary photography of the 1930s and ’40s; images of a post–World War II South in economic, racial, and psychic dissonance with the nation; photography as catalyst for change during the civil rights movement; reflective narrative photography of the late 20th century; and contemporary photography examining social, environmental, and economic issues.
A Long Arc presents a richly layered archive that captures the region’s beauty and complexity. Offering a full visual accounting of the South’s role in shaping American history, identity and culture, the exhibition includes photographs by Alexander Gardner, George Barnard, P.H. Polk, Lewis Hine, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Gillian Laub, Marion Post Wolcott, Robert Frank, Clarence John Laughlin, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Bruce Davidson, Danny Lyon, Doris Derby, Ernest Withers, William Eggleston, William Christenberry, Baldwin Lee, Sally Mann, Carrie Mae Weems, Susan Worsham, Carolyn Drake, Sheila Pree-Bright, RaMell Ross, and others.
The exhibition is co-curated by Sarah Kennel, PhD, VMFA’s Aaron Siskind Curator of Photography and Director of the Raysor Center, with Gregory J. Harris, The Donald and Marilyn Keough Family Curator of Photography at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.
A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845 is organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.
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