Reception for "Jack Leigh & Parker Stewart: In Place"

RECEPTION DETAILS:
Our reception for Jack Leigh and Parker Stewart will take place Thursday, May 7th from 6 to 9pm. Krazian food truck will be on-premises.

A first-of-its-kind exhibition at Laney Contemporary pairs the work of two Low Country landscape photographers who captured an evolving coastline — through industry collapse, climate change, and disappearing traditions — over the course of half a century.

“Jack Leigh & Parker Stewart: In Place”
On View: May 1 – August 1, 2026
Reception: Thursday, May 7, 6-9pm

Separated by time but connected by place, photographers Parker Stewart and the late Jack Leigh capture landscapes and communities in the outer reaches of coastal Georgia and South Carolina. Laney Contemporary’s “Jack Leigh & Parker Stewart: In Place” brings their work together for the first time in Savannah, this spring and summer.

Co-curated by Stewart and gallerist Susan Laney, “In Place” is the first time Leigh’s photos have been shown alongside a living photographer working in the same tradition, and the first exhibition of Leigh’s work in nearly a decade.

Savannah-born Leigh is known for his three-decade canon of rural and coastal photography. The novelist Pat Conroy once wrote of his “uncanny yet perfectly composed and cunning” images: “He cannot raise his camera without telling me about a South I never knew was there.” Leigh’s photograph “Midnight, Bonaventure Cemetery” became synonymous with Savannah after it was featured on the cover of the bestselling novel “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.” In dialogue with Leigh’s haunting landscapes is the work of Stewart, who also photographs the coastal region and has found himself again and again at many of the same off-the-beaten-path sites that caught Leigh’s eye a generation earlier.

Stewart, a SCAD graduate who settled in Savannah, began photographing the tidal landscapes of coastal Georgia and the Savannah River Basin in early 2020. On long, meandering scouting drives through rural Georgia and South Carolina, Stewart explored tidal waterways, shrimping docks, and primordial, fog-cloaked marshes. Later he recognized that Leigh travelled similar routes and visited the same sites, though the two never met. Leigh died of cancer 22 years ago, at age 55. Inspired by the place, and the spirit of Jack’s work, Stewart began to think of Leigh’s photobooks as “treasure maps.”

Stewart photographed an Estill, South Carolina water tower framed by silos, only to later discover that Leigh had shot the same scene 30 years prior. “I was tickled to find Jack had made the exact same photograph,” Stewart said. “Almost nothing had changed.” Other times, it was all but suggested by the scene. Returning to a McIntosh County shrimping dock that Stewart had photographed multiple times, he saw a boat he’d previously photographed was now half-submerged. “Immediately I thought of Jack’s image ‘Sunken Shrimp Boat,’ which was made on that same dock 40 years earlier, and set up my tripod to make my own.”

“In Place” examines a coast in constant flux. Industries that once supported the economy buckle under the pressures of climate and market change. Georgia’s shrimping fleet has diminished by 96 percent, from roughly 1,500 boats in Leigh’s era to fewer than 60 today. Similar trends have befallen the oystering communities Leigh photographed, and Gullah/Geechee families along the coast face compounding threats — among them, development and property loss. “He saw the condos being built, the rapid development of his home and the coast, and he acted with intention to preserve these places by documenting them, and doing it beautifully,” Stewart said of his predecessor’s work. “Leigh’s ability to find the quiet in the chaos is unsurpassed.”

Laney, who once ran the Jack Leigh Gallery and now represents his work, finds kinship with Stewart’s talent and sensibilities. “When I first saw Parker’s work, I recognized the same eye for environmental character and atmosphere,” Laney said. “Previously, I’ve shown Jack’s photographs alongside the artists who influenced him. Stewart is carrying the work forward, in the same places, with his own voice.

“Working with Jack for over 15 years,” continues Laney, “I was given the opportunity to know his process, how he was inspired, and how dedicated and connected he was to his work and community. I see a similar connection, passion, and drive in Stewart. The landscapes and passing ways of life that Jack captured have changed, yet much remains.”

Laney Contemporary is the exclusive representative of the Jack Leigh Collection. In 2014 at the SCAD Museum of Art, Laney co-curated “Jack Leigh: Full Circle, Low Country Photographs, 1972–2004,” which Hyperallergic named one of the country’s top five best exhibitions of the year.

“In Place” runs through August 1, 2026. An opening reception is slated for May 7 from 6 to 9 p.m.