Steve Schapiro The Fire Next Time, Sheila Pree Bright #1960Now

Exhibition Details

Steve Schapiro

The Fire Next Time

Sheila Pree Bright

#1960Now

October 1 - November 7

Reception: October 15, 4-9 PM

We are pleased to work with Jackson Fine Art in Atlanta to share this important exhibition with Savannah, a city with deep connections to and support of the Civil Rights Movement.

Laney Contemporary is honored to present Steve Schapiro’s civil rights photographs from the recent Taschen publication The Fire Next Time, an illustrated volume of James Baldwin’s classic text presented alongside Sheila Pree Bright’s photographs from #1960Now. A short film by Pree Bright entitled #1960Now: Art and Intersections, depicting intergenerational correlations between critical thinkers noted in history and emerging leaders around the nation will also be featured. This particularly current exhibition is an intense and revelatory conversation between two eras and two important photographers grappling with shared subject matter in differing times. Steve Schapiro (b. 1934, NY) and Sheila Pree Bright (b. 1967, GA), thirty years apart in age and fifty years apart in the events photographed, each dynamically emphasizes the power of documentary photography as a search for the truth. Schapiro’s iconic and empathic series was photographed during the Civil Rights Movement on the Selma to Montgomery march. Pree Bright’s work documents the 2014-15 Black Lives Matter protests sparked in Ferguson and Baltimore. Schapiro’s momentous and intimate work, paired with the striking series by Pree Bright, is an extraordinary dialogue of the civil rights struggle then and now.

Steve Schapiro, VOTE, Selma, 1965
Sheila Pree Bright, #1960Now (National March on Ferguson, 'We Can't Stop Now,' Protesting Police Violence and the Murder of Mike Brown), 2015