JACK LEIGH

THE LIGHT, THE HEAT: SUMMER IN THE SOUTH

Exhibition Details

Laney Contemporary presents The Light, The Heat: Summer in The South, a photography exhibition of Savannah and surrounding areas by Jack Leigh.

The Low Country each summer promises sweltering heat rising off of wet afternoon pavement, but it also declares revelatory, luminous vistas. Claustrophobic and yet inexhaustibly brilliant, the Savannah region is bathed in a light as sultry as it is saturated.   

The late photographer Jack Leigh remains practically synonymous with Savannah regional landscapes as he captured its midnight in the garden along with an aura of timelessness in the place that he called home from 1948 until 2004. Laney Contemporary Fine Art has become itself practically synonymous with Jack Leigh, as Susan Laney, a long-time assistant to Leigh and director of the Jack Leigh Gallery, has been representing and maintaining his estate since his untimely passing. The Light, The Heat not only celebrates Leigh’s acute and romantic sensitivity to light, key to the best photography, but it also announces Laney Contemporary’s expansion into a new, downstairs gallery space fully dedicated to photography and to works on paper with a year-round viewing space for Jack Leigh’s photography. The expansion will allow access to the works of Jack Leigh year-round, while also presenting other photographers.

Leigh’s project of defining “the South,” but especially The Low Country, as familial, hard-working, melancholy, and location-specific was in the vein of peers such as William Christenberry and William Eggleston, though Leigh’s aesthetic remained black & white, focused on the mood and tonal charm of the mundane, the marshlands, fishing villages and roadside towns.

A Savannah native and graduate of The University of Georgia, Leigh left to photograph the world only to return and discover that “there was something distinctly different about the images I made while I was home.” He spoke of his image entitled Savannah Saw Works (1977), saying that he “wanted viewers to feel the heat of the day” as the circular saw advertisements on a hand-painted billboard echo the circular spokes of a pedestrian’s open umbrella, as she ambles along seeking even the most scant relief from the dizzying mid-day heat. The exhibition consists of photographs ranging from urban Savannah streets to life along the 250-mile Ogeechee River. In this refreshing selection of Leigh images marking the inauguration of a new Savannah home space for his work, home is where the heat is.