Life & photography amongst the Inuit and Yupik, innovators in remote lands. A Conversation with Alex Harris — Part I
A conversation with Alex Harris — Part 1/a
“I was a suburban Atlanta kid who had gone to Ivy League schools, but this became the world that I felt comfortable in, and I had a hard time at the beginning when I would come back to the ‘Lower 48’.”
We are excited to present part I of a conversation with award winning photographer Alex Harris, who shares with us the story of his Alaska journeys between 1973 and 1978, during which he lived in the remote villages of the Inuit People in the Kobuk River Region, and the Yupik of the Southern Bering Sea Coast. Alex reflects on his iconic photos published by the New York Graphic Society in 1978, as well as lesser known ones. He explains how time has given him a new perspective on his travels and photography. His photos have been exhibited at the J. Paul Getty, and are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, amongst others.
Our conversation with Alex takes place almost ten years after our first interview. That conversation, covering the breadth of his work, left us with a desire to focus exclusively on his remarkable Alaska pictures, a desire which we have now finally realized. It is an honor for MB Abram to have been chosen to represent these photos, exhibited for the first time in thirty years.
A conversation with Alex Harris — Part 1/b
Alex's books include: Old and On Their Own with Robert Coles; The First and Last Eskimos with Robert Coles; Red White and Blue and God Bless You; Gertrude Blom, Bearing Witness, with Margaret Sartor; Why We Are Here, with the evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson; The Idea of Cuba; River of Traps, A New Mexico Mountain Life with William deBuys, the book a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in non-fiction; Dream of a House: The Passions and Preoccupations of Reynolds Price with Margaret Sartor; and many others.
In 2018-19 Alex photographed 41 independent narrative film sets across the South, as commissioned by the High Museum. Our Strange New Land, the chronicle of that work, will be published by Yoffy Press in September 2021, co-authored by Alex and his wife Margaret Sartor. Alex and Margaret have collaborated on numerous projects including “Where We Find Ourselves: The photographs of Hugh Mangum, 1897-1922” exhibited in 2018 at the Nasher Museum, the book published in association with the Center for Documentary Photography at Duke University.
A conversation with Alex Harris — Part 1/c