When you walk into Jackson Fine Art Gallery in Buckhead, look immediately to the right and you’ll see a Steve Schapiro photograph taken in 1968. It shows a woman lying in bed reading a newspaper. “THE WORST IS YET TO COME,” the headline shouts, words that feel foreboding then and now. But if the past is pretext, we know that as a nation we have survived our worst days thus far.
Curators at Jackson Fine Art Gallery reflect on some of those difficult days in a double photography exhibition, Steve Schapiro: In Celebration of the Fire Next Time and Sheila Pree Bright: #1960Now. Both are on view through September 19.
Schapiro, a New Yorker who is white, traveled with author James Baldwin throughout the American South as civil rights protesters prepared to march from Selma to Montgomery. From his Harlem home, he accompanied Baldwin into North Carolina, Alabama and Mississippi. The exhibition is, in fact, named for Baldwin’s 1963 novel The Fire Next Time. Schapiro’s images illustrate the text in the exhibition catalog.
