Mark Steinmetz, South East, 2020

Designed as a companion book to his critically-acclaimed monograph South Central, Mark Steinmetz here turns his focus to Athens and Atlanta, New Orleans, Memphis and East Tennessee, and the roads between. Highly regarded for his black-and-white portraits, Steinmetz is renowned for producing powerful pictures which capture the strong sense of displacement and isolation that is felt by many young Americans. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. South East opens with an introduction by Peter Galassi, former Chief Curator of the Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art in New York: “Mark Steinmetz works in a venerable tradition of photographic prowling that bets everything on the ordinary. Each picture is the fruit of an unplanned encounter: Though the photographer may know more or less where he is going, he can’t know precisely what he will find. An accumulation of these improvised perceptions can make both a world and a way of looking at it.”