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Duke Professor's Photographs of Hispanic Life on Display in Spain

A retrospective exhibit of documentary photographs by Alex Harris, professor of the practice of public policy studies and one of the founders of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, will open Sept. 28 at the Institute of Modern Art in Valencia, Spain. "Islands in Time" will include 90 color and black-and-white photos spanning 25 years of Harris' work that capture images of Hispanic life in an isolated region of northern New Mexico and in Havana. A catalog of the exhibit will feature some 140 images with accompanying texts by Spanish and American scholars. Many of the images never before have been exhibited or published. Institute curator Katherine Slusher, a native of New Mexico who has lived in Spain for years, called the exhibit "a journey into places populated with people who have conserved a culture outside the mainstream. ... For reasons of culture, politics and poverty, these places (northern New Mexico and Havana) have remained isolated and insular." The photographs, she said, portray two examples of Spanish migration with "a curious American edge." "I think what's so interesting to the curators is the notion that my photographs are a window onto a fascinating part of the Spanish diaspora that isn't well known in Spain," Harris said. "For their audience, it's kind of like finding a long-lost cousin, or part of a family tree that split off years back and developed its own dialect and culture. The pictures show how the original seed from Spain has grown and now manifests itself in this country and in Havana." Some photos in the exhibit date back to 1973, when Harris began photographing elderly Hispanics in a remote mountain village in New Mexico. Harris continued capturing images of life in the region for years, traveling between Duke and his second home in New Mexico. He documented the villagers' culture through photos of their homes, inside and out. During the decade when he experimented with color photography, he was fascinated with how the people themselves saw their landscape, he explained. For one study in the '80s, he took photos from the back seat of young people's cars, showing the Hispanics' world through the autos they drove. In 1998, he took the idea of viewing life through the icon of the automobile to Cuba, where he photographed Havana from the perspective of the ancient American vehicles still in use. For Harris, the two years of work putting together the exhibit have been "a process of discovery." Many of the photos included have not been printed or published in Harris' previous books. "I was able to go back over different projects I'd worked on, to go over half a lifetime's work and to choose images that I hadn't selected in the past. At the opening, I'll be seeing all this work together for the first time and perhaps seeing in a cohesive way what I've been up to all this time," he said. The institute, known for its collections and exhibits of avant-garde paintings, drawings and sculptures, and for extensive publications associated with its exhibits, has given Valencia a world reputation in the arts. "Islands in Time" will be on exhibit through December. Duke's Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library will also obtain a complete set of prints from the Valencia exhibit, which will be available for viewing later this fall. The collection will join other photographs to form a historical record of Harris' work.

Written by Karen Hines.