Dazzling images of birds are among the highlights of this career survey of the artist’s work, which spans documentary efforts, portraiture and nature photography.

“Debbie Fleming Caffery: In Light of Everything,” a retrospective of over 50 years of Ms. Caffery’s work at the New Orleans Museum of Art through May 5, begins at the end. The main entrance to NOMA opens on a spacious atrium, and on its surrounding walls are 12 of the 91 medium-format, black-and-white prints in the exhibition, the first of Ms. Caffery’s pictures one sees. They are all of birds and all dated between 2018 and 2022—recent work in her long career. She was born in 1948 in southern Louisiana, and spent time with her grandfather who raised guinea hens, homing and tumbler pigeons, doves and bantam chickens. The wall text quotes her: “After school I would often go with my grandfather to feed his birds at a beautiful magical place on the Bayou Teche. I felt like I was in a bird paradise!” In 2018, she discovered organizations in New Mexico that rescued injured birds, healed them and released them back into the wild; many were injured beyond releasing. Those birds reminded her of her attachment to her grandfather’s, and she has been photographing birds there and elsewhere since.

Exhibition at New Orleans Museum of Art that closed on May 5, 2024

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Debbie Fleming Caffery is an artist born and working in southwest Louisiana. Her book In Light of Everything (Radius Books, 2024) includes photographs from seven bodies of work taken over six decades of an expansive career. The release of this publication coincides with her first major career retrospective at the New Orleans Museum of Art, October 6th, 2023 – May 5th, 2024.

The photographs move fluidly within the book, with themes of shared human experience. Bearing witness to faith, the dignity of labor, the environment, as well other social and economic structures, Caffery offers a raw and honest glimpse of humanity.

She embraces a connection that is personal and real by embedding herself within communities and photographing people and places she knows well. Through light and shadow, she conceals and reveals dualities of comfort and tension, familiarity and mystery, worldliness, and spirituality.

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Debbie Fleming Caffery’s mastery of the lens shines brightly in the spectacular photo book: In Light of Everything.

Debbie Fleming Caffery’s photography is deeply personal. She lures us into her shadowy world, a mysterious black-and-white landscape she has created with only her camera. In each image, we are exposed to a localized perspective of the American South, experiencing the everyday minutiae that only true locals would know. 

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Another advance copy we were fortunate to see at Paris Photo is this catalog of Debbie Fleming Caffery's first museum career retrospective at the New Orleans Museum of Art. It is an enormous tome filled with the photographer's trademark chiaroscuro and expressive blur from each of her longterm projects. She brings her gothic southern sensibility from New Orleans to all her imagery: sugar cane workers and burning fields in the south, prostitutes in Mexico, animals, and images from Europe and the American southwest. Caffery's photographs are by turns humorous and melancholic, revealing an artist with a deep sensitivity and emotional range.

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Watching her grandfather care for birds instilled a lifelong reverence in Debbie Fleming Caffery that inspired a magical series of avian portraits – and a greater appreciation for those who rehabilitate injured birds.

Last July, I attended Debbie Fleming Caffery’s beautiful exhibition Portraits of Birds at Obscura Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and was mesmerised by the rich beauty of this work. While the subject matter is different than earlier work, these majestic portraits mirror the same respect, admiration and reverence she conveyed for her human subjects in the past. I have been a longtime fan of Caffery’s poetic imagery in former projects such as Carry Me Home, Polly, Hurricane Images and Alphabet, and first wrote about her in this column in December 2009 when I selected her hypnotic book Spirit and the Flesh as the best monograph of the year. In 2005, she received the Guggenheim Fellowship for a series she created about women working in Mexican brothels. And in 2006, she received the Katrina Media Fellowship from Open Society Foundations to help support her continued work on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

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Louisiana-based Debbie Fleming Caffery is recognized as one of the leading photographers of the American South. This book includes 100 dramatic black-and-white photographs from her most important series made in the American South, Mexico, and France from the 1970s to the present, published to coincide with her first career retrospective presented at the New Orleans Museum of Art now through March 2024.

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In 1996, the High began commissioning photographers from across the world to engage with and explore the American South’s rich social and geographic landscape for its Picturing the South initiative. To date, the Museum has commissioned sixteen artists and has built a collection of more than three hundred photographs as part of the program, which include some of the most iconic photography projects of the last quarter century.

To mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of Picturing the South, the High will mount a major exhibition that brings together all the commissions for the first time. Taken as a whole, the photographs amount to a complex and layered archive of the region that addresses broad themes, from the legacy of slavery and racial justice to the social implications of the evolving landscape and the distinct and diverse character of the region’s people.

Works on view will include the first photographs in Sally Mann’s Motherland series; Dawoud Bey’s over-life-size portraits of Atlanta high school students; Richard Misrach’s Cancer Alleyindustrial landscapes; along with previous commissions by Alex Webb, Emmet Gowin, Alec Soth, Martin Parr, Kael Alford, Shane Lavalette, Abelardo Morell, Debbie Fleming Caffery, Alex Harris, and Mark Steinmetz; and new commissions by An-My Lê, Sheila Pree Bright, and Jim Goldberg, which will debut in the exhibition.

This exhibition is organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.

Exhibition on View: November 4, 2021 – February 6, 2022

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