Seeing the South, Selections from The Do Good Fund

In the Spring of 2025, ARTS Southeast was honored to work with The Do Good Fund to curate the exhibition Tomorrow and Yesterday, Selections from the Do Good Fund on display in our Ellis Gallery in Savannah, and to share some images from the collection in IMPACT.

Visit www.thedogoodfund.com to learn more and hear more stories from photographers through their Small Talks project.

All images appear courtesy of The Do Good Fund

“This gentleman is named ‘Mr. Clean’ – the guys made fun of him because he was always nicely dressed. He was just stepping out of his truck when I ran up to get this photo of him... upbeat music was playing, you can see the stereo speaker and his friend was meeting him at the door, and there’s kittens hanging around, and there were young guys hanging around, and older guys, and of course they were playing checkers and a couple of dogs came strolling through – it just was a nice kind of community picnic environment.

Anyway, they invited me back and I did indeed come back… I got the sense they did it every day. I did come back a year later to get a photo to Mr. Clean, and he wasn’t there but all the guys were, and they assured me they would get his picture to him. I probably could go back today and they would be there.”

– Tamara Reynolds Small Talks, The Do Good Fund

“I knew that there was a photographic possibility here. In this case I felt it so strongly that what I did was 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. 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.”

– Baldwin Lee Small Talks, The Do Good Fund

“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.”

– Gordon Parks Small Talks, The Do Good Fund

“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.”

– Maude Schuyler Clay Small Talks, The Do Good Fund