Poignant Pics no. 77: On Anne Berry's "The Visitor"
“This is a place where grandmothers hold babies on their laps under the stars and whisper in their ears that the lights in the sky are holes in the floor of heaven.”
The Visitor
Anne Berry is a Southerner, born, raised, and living in Georgia. And while best known for her portraits of primates, Berry is passionate about visiting and protecting the wilderness coastal areas of the South. That passion leads her to make gorgeous photographs of the primarily undeveloped barrier islands off the coast of Georgia.
I'm a Yankee by birth, a Californian for most of my life, and an Islander by marriage. Except for Florida, I have never spent time in the American South outside of a few brief excursions to significant cities. My photographs are often melancholic laments of my life experiences.
It seems from these descriptions somewhat unlikely that I would gush over Berry's work, but gush I do.
Recently, I wrote about someone's work and the maker somehow having known my longing for "home," a place that exists now only in my imagination and senses, so can never be attained. I feel that same way about the coastal South, even though I have never visited its picturesque landscapes. Photographs of this area have always spoken to the deepest parts of my soul. They hold an untamable wildness with an aging grace that lies just below the surface. Perhaps I lived in the rural South in a previous life, but I'll never that know one way or the other with any sureity. Just as I yearn for the nonexistent place I think of as home, I also long to explore the out-of-the-way places of the coastal South that seem to call my name.
Though The Visitor could have been made anywhere with an aging and neglected building, it sings to me of my mental picture of the South (which is most likely a fairy tale that exists only in my head.) I'm unsure precisely what makes me say this; it may be the girls' attire. But I was taken with this image the second I saw it. An innocence is present within the frame, which makes it seem untouched by modernity, and that is not simply due to the children alone. The Visitor is both timeless and a throwback to a much earlier era.
Berry told me, "I made this image, The Visitor, on a family trip to Cumberland Island. One portfolio reviewer criticized it as poverty porn, but it is a photograph of my granddaughters at a shed in the yard of a mansion built by Lucy Carnegie in 1901. The beautiful, weathered tabby structure is a reminder of the ephemeral nature of all human creations."
I can't wait to see what Berry does next.
Artist Bio
Anne Berry is an internationally exhibited artist from Atlanta, Georgia. Her photographs investigate the animal world, the domain of childhood, and the terrain of the Southern wilderness. The memories, stories and settings of Berry’s Southern upbringing have influenced her work, infusing it with a darkly romantic and southern gothic feeling. She has had solo exhibitions at the Centre for Visual and Performing Arts in Newnan, GA, The Lamar Dodd Art Center in LAGrange, GA and The Rankin Arts Center in Columbus, GA. Books include Through Glass(North Light Press, 2014), Primates (21st Editions, 2017), and Behind Glass, (2021). More of her work can be found at anneberrystudio.com
Author Bio
Diana Nicholette Jeon is an award-winning artist based in Honolulu, HI, who works primarily with lens-based media. Her work has been seen both internationally and nationally in solo and group exhibitions. Jeon holds an MFA from UMBC.