High Museum To Debut First U.S. Magnum Live Lab Photography Residency And Exhibition

This spring, the High Museum of Art will be the first-ever U.S. venue for Live Lab, a photography residency and related exhibition organized in collaboration with the international photographic cooperative Magnum Photos. Live Lab is designed to involve the community in the realization of a new body of photographs, which will be created over a two-week period in a "lab" at the Museum. The Atlanta project will feature American photographer Carolyn Drake and South African artists Lindokuhle Sobekwa and Mikhael Subotzky, whose projects all will explore themes relevant to the city.

The process begins with a two-week-long "photographic jam session" (March 16-27, 2020) during which the photographers will use the High as their base of operations. They will travel into the city and metro area to shoot photographs, which they will then edit, make and sequence on site at the Museum. To render their creative process transparent, the photographers will open their workspace (located in the lobby of the High's Anne Cox Chambers Wing) to the public at select times. The residency will culminate in a pop-up exhibition of the photographers' work, on view in the Chambers lobby from March 28 through April 19, 2020.

Magnum Photos has hosted Live Labs in cities around the world, including London; Paris; Shenzhen, China; Kyoto, Japan; and most recently, Moscow.

"We are honored that Magnum chose the High, and Atlanta, as its first U.S. host for Live Lab, and we are delighted to bring this project to the city," said Rand Suffolk, Nancy and Holcombe T. Green, Jr., director of the High. "This collaboration is a testament to the strength of our photography department and our commitment to supporting the creation of new work and offering innovative ways for our audience to connect with their museum and the greater community. We can't wait to see what the photographers create."

To help the artists learn more about Atlanta, the High provided them with a brief on the city, which touched on topics including its history, economy and position as the crossroads of the new South. The photographers are now in the process of developing their projects' focus and scope.

"We look forward to welcoming these incredible photographers to Atlanta and to lifting the veil on their creative process for our visitors," said Gregory Harris, the High's assistant curator of photography. "Ours is a vibrant yet complicated and ever-changing city. It will be thrilling to see Atlanta through the lenses of these artists."

About the photographers:

Carolyn Drake (born 1971) is a California native now based in the Bay Area. She studied media/culture and history in the 1990s at Brown University, where she became interested in approaches to documentary and the ways that history and reality are purposefully shaped and revised over time. She worked for multimedia companies in New York for many years but eventually left her office job to engage with the physical world through photography. Between 2007 and 2013, Drake traveled frequently to Central Asia from her base in Istanbul to work on two projects that became acclaimed photo books. "Two Rivers" explores the connections between ecology, culture and political power along the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers. "Wild Pigeon" is an amalgam of photographs, drawings and embroideries she made in collaboration with Uyghur people in western China. Her latest book, "Knit Club," will be published by TBW Books in the spring of 2020. Drake is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize, a World Press Photo award, a Magnum Emergency Fund grant and a Fulbright fellowship, among other awards. She became a Magnum nominee in 2015.

Lindokuhle Sobekwa (born 1995 in Katlehong, Johannesburg) came to photography in 2012 through his participation in the Of Soul and Joy Project, an educational program run in Thokoza, a township in southeastern Johannesburg. He went on to study with Bieke Depoorter, Cyprien Clément-Delmas, Thabiso Sekgala, Tjorven Bruyneel and Kutlwano Moagi. His early projects explore poverty and unemployment in the townships of South Africa as well as the growing nyaope drug crisis within them. His ongoing projects also address his own life-for example, his project "I Carry Her Photo with Me" examines his relationship with his sister, Ziyanda, who was estranged from her family when she died. In 2017, this project was selected by the Magnum Foundation's Photography and Social Justice program for further development, and in 2018 Sobekwa received the Magnum Foundation Fund to continue his long-term project "Nyaope," which has been selected for a residency at La Cité des Arts de la Réunion. Sobekwa became a Magnum nominee in 2018.

Mikhael Subotzky (born 1981 in Cape Town, South Africa) is currently based in Johannesburg. His photographic work, which combines the directness of the social documentary mode with a questioning of the nature of the photographic medium, explores the relationship between social storytelling and the formal poetics of image making. Over the past eight years, Subotzky has focused on the inside and outside of South Africa's notorious prisons, the small town of Beaufort West and Ponte City, an iconic building in Johannesburg. Subotzky's work has been exhibited widely in major galleries and museums, and his prints are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the South African National Gallery, Cape Town; and the Johannesburg Art Gallery. Recent awards and grants include the 2011 Discovery Award at Rencontres de la Photographie d'Arles, the 2009 Leica Oskar Barnack Award, the 2008 W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund grant, and the 2007 KLM Paul Huf Award. His only monograph to date, "Beaufort West," was published by Chris Boot Publishers and was the subject of the 2008 exhibition "New Photography: Josephine Meckseper and Mikhael Subotzky" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.