NEW ORLEANS (press release) – Next month, the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) opens the first major retrospective of photographer Debbie Fleming Caffery, with black-and-white prints ranging from the 1970’s to the present. Debbie Fleming Caffery: In Light of Everything is the first exhibition to include examples representative of her entire body of work, including photographs taken throughout Louisiana and Mississippi, Mexico, and France over six decades. The exhibition includes Caffery’s renowned documentary images of people working in Louisiana’s sugar cane fields, as well as her most recent project creating exquisitely humanized portraits of birds around the world, some of which live in rescue and rehabilitation centers. Caffery is recognized as one of the foremost contemporary photographers from the American South, with a career that both grows from and stretches beyond her work in her native Louisiana. In Light of Everything will be on view at NOMA from October 6 through March 3, 2024.
In Caffery’s own words, the exhibition is “about that moment, in taking a photograph, when everything works…eyes, guts, heart, life experiences, [and] years of paying attention.” In Light of Everything will be installed in multiple galleries throughout the museum, including in the Great Hall where visitors will encounter large, haunting photographs of birds that are best described as avian portraiture. In the A. Charlotte Mann and Joshua Mann Pailet Gallery and Templeman Galleries visitors will see important works from Caffery’s career making photographs in various locales that draw on themes of faith, the dignity of labor, and the environment, among other subjects. The works from these series are presented together in this exhibition for the first time.
“The work of Debbie Fleming Caffery is deeply rooted in her native Louisiana, and at the same time captures human experiences and perceptions that literally and metaphorically transcend geographic boundaries,” said Susan Taylor, The Montine McDaniel Freeman Director of the New Orleans Museum of Art. “Central to NOMA’s mission is organizing and presenting exhibitions that reflect a unique sense of place while sharing ideas and insights that are universally relevant.”
“Debbie Fleming Caffery’s practice engages with a number of traditions in the history of photography—from the legacy of Dorothea Lange and her work for the WPA and FSA, to both landscape and surrealist photography,” said Brian Piper, Freeman Family Curator of Photographs, Prints, and Drawings at the New Orleans Museum of Art. “Throughout her career, Caffery has built on that documentary sensibility by building relationships with the people she photographs, resulting in cohesive series with real emotional weight.”
Caffery’s extensive work in the South resonates far beyond its place of origin, with pictures that function as meditations on different aspects of her subject’s lives framed in a way that is at once familiar and eye-opening. Caffery’s work emphasizes the deep emotional relationship between people and place, while raising questions about social and economic structures. In Light of Everything demonstrates how Caffery’s work introduces us to light in the darkness: shared human experiences captured in emotive images that hover between tranquility and unrest.
Debbie Fleming Caffery was born in Louisiana in 1948. Her work ranges from her early photographs of the cyclic seasons of the sugarcane fields, to the devastating effects of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, to life in Mexico with juxtaposed images of religious rituals and daily life in a cantina that also served as an active brothel. Caffery’s work is included in many collections, including the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and other institutions. She has been awarded many grants and fellowships—most notably a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Fellowship from the Open Society Foundations, George Soros Foundation—and in 2015, she received a commission from the High Museum of Art in Atlanta for their Picturing the South photography initiative. Her work has been the subject of five monographs to date: Carry Me Home(Smithsonian, 1990), The Shadows (Twin Palms Press, 2002), Polly (Twin Palms Press, 2004), The Spirit & The Flesh (Radius Books, 2009), and Alphabet (Fall Line Press, 2015).
