Opening Reception: May 2nd, 5 – 9PM during First Fridays in Starland
Presented in conjunction with First Fridays in Starland, Sulfur Street Fair, and IMPACT Magazine Vol. 4 No. 1 Release Party
closing reception: june 6th, 5 - 9PM during First Fridays in Starland
EXHIBITION WALK-THRu With Alan Rothschild, founder of The Do Good Fund: June 7th, 2PM
On Display: May 2nd – June 14th, 2025
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Tomorrow and Yesterday brings together over 30 photographs from The Do Good Fund — a public photography archive based in Columbus, GA — featuring a broad cross-section of Southern image makers working from the post-WWII era to the present.
These images document rural and urban landscapes, family life, friendship, work, protest, and play. Together, they reflect how Southern photographers have captured moments of change, connection, and continuity across generations. As the South continues to shift — culturally, environmentally, politically — the photographs in The Do Good Fund’s collection serve as vital documents of memory and place.
These renowned photographers have made images that feel at once familiar and transporting, lifting the veil between the everyday lives of Southerners and the unspoken undercurrents that shape those lives. Baldwin Lee holds up a mirror to Southern humanity and experience in velvety black and white, while Jill Frank lays bare the earnest, vulnerable, and exploratory expressions of adolescence in full color. The quiet power of Gordon Parks’ socially and artistically significant images resonates as strongly now as when they were produced, echoing the present through the not-so-distant past. As he famously said, “I saw that a camera could be a weapon against poverty, against racism, against all sorts of social wrongs. I knew at that point I had to have a camera.” It is our hope that by making these works accessible to the Savannah community, we may play a small role in inspiring the next generation of Southern photographers.
Featured Artists
Carolyn Drake, William Ferris, Jill Frank, Lee Friedlander, Peyton Fulford, Andres Gonzalez, Emmet Gowin, Stacy Kranitz, Baldwin Lee, Gordon Parks, Sheila Pree Bright, Tamara Reynolds, Jeff Rich, RaMell Ross, Maude Schuyler Clay, Sage Sohier, Mike Smith, Mark Steinmetz, Susan Worsham, Brandon Thibodeaux
VIEW WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION BELOW
SMALL TALKS
COURTESY OF THE DO GOOD FUND
Scroll on to hear/read about each of the works below!
“One of Mr. and Mrs. Albert Thornton’s granddaughters, Virgie Lee Tanner, lived near them in Mobile. At 25 she has 4 children. Having been married for 6 years to Henry Tanner, 34, a mechanic at Brookley Air Force Base. Discrimination in employment does not affect her family – her husband’s civil service job pays $80 a week – but other restraints do affect them. They must tell their children that they cannot they cannot play in a nearby playground for whites, but must use a separate but equal one for negroes. The children do not understand the logic of this, and view the white playground as a special, wonderful place from which they are being deliberately excluded. The Tanners’ house is a 2-room, $20 a month shack with one bedroom in which all 6 members of the family sleep. Little else is available for them to rent in the segregated neighborhood in which they live. Mr. Tanner is now taking the only way out of the situation he can see: he is building his own 4-bedroom house on a lot he has purchased in another part of town. But he has no illusions about what it will be when he is finished: another small, crowded house in another segregated neighborhood.”
“This was a young man on a very back road in (I think) Tate County, Mississippi, or Yalobusha perhaps. I was headed somewhere and I stopped to take a photograph of an old gas station, as this boy emerged from a trailer nearby as I was photographing the gas station. And I asked him if I could take his picture. He was very talkative, and the wisteria was in full bloom, and he looked like he could have been from the streets of New York or LA – he was pretty different looking for that part of the world. But I think the photograph is important because of the wisteria. If you took that away, it probably wouldn’t have been that good of a photograph. But I was glad to get this picture of this kid, and I wonder where he is now.”
“This image right here is in Stone Mountain, and it’s very – if you didn’t know anything about this image, it’s very conflicted, because you have the police officers in the back, and you have this black woman who’s dressed in Afro garb with her hair wrapped and she’s carrying that symbolism of the Confederate flag. So people’s ideologies will say – the Confederacy, the white nationionalists – ‘oh, she’s with us,’ ok? But then other people that are not of the culture that know about this flag would be very upset with her. So I look at this as a very powerful image because it can be very conflicting, but at the moment when this happened there was a lot going on on that mountain, and when I saw that image I immediately took it, not really thinking much about it until after I saw the image and I found her – and she told me that she was claiming that flag because that flag is not doing anything to her, it doesn’t mean anything to her. So it was about her claiming the flag.”
“The South is a distinctive place, rich in culture, strong through adversity. What does it mean to be Southern? I owed it to myself to find the limits of my own identity. I found I was defensive for my heritage, but at the same time apologetic for it. I had to delve into my heart to understand these conflicting feelings. How was I to navigate forward, claiming my Southerness? And the South was morphing into something unrecognizable. It was losing its singularity. The project began with a sense of nostalgia. Paradoxically, I was homesick for a place I wasn’t sure I wanted to find. But along the way I discovered a more rewarding sense of place – like the blanket of kudzu holding back erosion, we Southerners have a shared experience that binds us together. We may be different on the surface, but underneath we are bound together on one common ground – and that ground is home.”
“Oftentimes after photographing all day, I’m pretty much exhausted. On this day, I was ready to pack it in, to get back into the car and to drive back to the motel for a hot shower and a meal. But for some reason I decided to walk a little bit further in this Monroe, Louisiana neighborhood. I’m so glad that I did because as I turned a corner I saw these young men playing basketball. The man who’s leaning up against the post seemed to me to be absolutely wonderful, and I knew that there was a photographic possibility here. In this case I felt it so strongly that what I did was really, I think – really pretty forward: I walked right up to them and I said, ‘You have to let me take a picture. I have to make a photograph here. You are so great, you’re going to make a wonderful photograph.’ My attitude was that I was never going to take no for an answer. I would never leave without taking a photograph. And they responded by laughing; looking at each other and saying ‘there’s no picture here to be taken.’ I said, ‘I assure you – I’m positive of it. And they finally agreed, and I went ahead and I posed them the way that you see them. The man leaning against the post, I think, is one of the most amazing looking people I’ve ever photographed – better than anything I could have imagined.”
About The Do Good Fund
The Do Good Fund, Inc. is a Columbus, Georgia based public charity. Since its founding in 2012, the fund has focused on building a museum-quality collection of photographs taken in the American South since World War II. The collection ranges from works by more than twenty Guggenheim Fellows to images by lesser known and emerging photographers working in the region.
Do Good’s mission is to make its collection of more than 800 images broadly accessible through regional museums, nonprofit galleries, and nontraditional venues and to encourage complementary, community-based programming to accompany each exhibition.
