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Editor’s note: ArtsATL has presented many stories in recent years in Atlanta’s artists’ own words. This new series, “My Atlanta,” turns the spotlight on photographers, who will use their images and supporting text to illustrate how living in Atlanta has inspired their careers and lives.
Today we present the words and photography of Sheila Pree Bright.
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Atlanta is like a coming home because I don’t have a foundation of what it means to be raised in a place called home. My parents are from the South but I wasn’t raised in the South. I spent my early childhood in Germany, a daughter of a soldier.
Upon our return to the United States, our family traveled between several states, including Colorado and Kansas. Those states did not have significant Black populations, so when I moved to Atlanta it was like coming home to Black Mecca of the South, which has influenced my work. My father encouraged me to go to school to study photography and I received my Master of Fine Arts at Georgia State University.
As a photographic artist, I am interested in people and communities that are often unseen. My earliest experience as a photographer was in Houston, where I photographed the gangsta rap scene in a way that confronted the dynamic between hip-hop and gun culture.
I have also focused my camera on the way Black women have traditionally been portrayed in Western culture. In Plastic Bodies, I digitally manipulated photographs of multi-ethnic women and dolls, and I examined Barbie as a cultural icon. The work looks at idolatry as it applies to how society views beauty and women of color.
I was selected for MOCA GA’s Working Artist Project in 2014. That’s when I exhibited the series #1960Now, featuring portraits of past and present social-justice activists with documentary images from recent protests throughout the United States. That series sheds light on the parallels between the 1960s Civil Rights Movement and today’s Black Lives Matter movement.
I’m honored that the #1960Now series is in several collections, including the Smithsonian African American History and Culture Museum, The High Museum of Art and The Center for Civil and Human Rights.
I want to capture images of people whose ideas and responses to what’s happening in the world are rarely heard. That leads to my creating contemporary stories about social, political and historical contexts not often seen in traditional media and fine-art platforms. I want to capture aspects of our culture, and sometimes counterculture, that challenge the typical narratives of Western thought and power structures.
Through the lens of my camera, Atlanta is where I have received my inspiration to create contemporary stories through a Black gaze.
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In graduate school, living in the heart of downtown, I began to explore the city with my camera. While walking the streets, amongst the commotion of traffic, loud music and vendors, I was drawn to the sounds of chanting and preaching. I followed the voices until I stood in front of Five Points metro station. Amid the hustle and bustle of pedestrians stood “everyday people” ministering to anyone who would listen. They were compelled only to give the world a message.
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The hip-hop culture is a force to be reckoned with in Atlanta. In 2018, the rapper 2 Chainz leased a home on Howell Mill Road in Midtown to promote his new album Pretty Girls Like Trap Music. His campaign went viral on social-media platforms worldwide. Fans flocked to the house in droves and took selfies in front of the house.
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As I continued to develop my artistic practice, I was captivated by the hip-hop scene where young Black people in the city are into punk and alternative subcultures that speak through music, art, film and fashion, from Apache Cafe to Afropunk Festival. I love the phrase by the rapper André 3000 of OutKast, “The South has something to say.”
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Living in Atlanta since 2000, I have learned of the lavish landscape of Black culture, from the Civil Rights Movement to hip-hop culture. Many young Black people in the city are into punk and alternative subcultures, speaking through music, art, film and fashion. Afropunk Festival, which originated in Brooklyn, New York, and came to Atlanta for the first time in 2017, became their outlet.
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I had the opportunity to attend the Afropunk Festival in the Mechanicsville community. As I entered the space and moved through the sound of the music and laughter, people were outwardly expressing themselves through their Afrofuturistic aesthetic, posing for photographers to capture their essence.
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