| Alex
Harris
Alex Harris was born in 1949 in Atlanta, Ga., and grew up in the
South. He attended Phillips Andover Academy and Yale University.
After graduation from Yale in 1971, he photographed in North Carolina
as part of a Duke University research project.
In 1972 he began a collaboration with Robert Coles that would result
in six years of photographic work in New Mexico and Alaska and in
the publication of two books with Coles: The Old Ones of New Mexico
(UNM Press, 1973) and The Last and First Eskimos (New York Graphic
Society, 1978).
During these years, while continuing to live and photograph in northern
New Mexico villages, Harris began to commute to North Carolina to
teach documentary photography at Duke University. In 1980 he founded
the Center for Documentary Photography at Duke, which he directed
for eight years. Subsequently he became a founding member of the
Center for
Documentary Studies and is currently a Professor of the Practice
of Public Policy and Documentary Studies at Duke. Within the Public
Policy Program he is co-director of the Hart Fellows Program and
Documentary Initiative.
River of Traps (UNM Press, 1990), his book with writer William deBuys,
was a 1991 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in general non-fiction.
His next book, Red White Blue and God Bless You, was published in
1992 by UNM Press in association with a national traveling exhibition
that opened at the International Center of Photography in New York
City in 1994.
A selection of Harris' photographs was published in Old and On Their
Own (W.W. Norton, 1998) with text by Robert Coles and additional
photographs by Thomas Roma.
As
an editor, Harris has published the following:
Gertrude
Blom: Bearing Witness (UNC Press, 1982) with Margaret Sartor
A
World Unsuspected: Portraits of Southern Childhood
(UNC Press, 1985)
In
The Streets
by Helen Levitt (Duke University Press, 1985)
Beyond
the Barricades: Popular Resistance in South Africa (Aperture,
1989)
A
New Life: Stories and Photographs from the Suburban South (Norton,
1996),
Airport,
photographs by Gary Winogrand, edited by Harris with Lee Friedlander
(DAP, 2000).
In 1995 Harris and Coles launched a new national magazine, DoubleTake.
Harris worked with Coles as co-editor through March 1998. With colleagues
at the International Center of Photography in New York, Harris has
curated a number of international traveling exhibitions.
His own photographs are included in the collections of The Museum
of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The J. Paul Getty
Museum, The Addison Gallery of Contemporary Art, and the High Museum
of Art in Atlanta. His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship in
photography, a N.C. Visual Artist Fellowship from the NEA, and a
Lyndhurst Award. Harris is married to Margaret Sartor; they have
a son and a daughter.
Photo
documentary by Alex Harris: Innovations
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