Sheila Pree Bright is an acclaimed fine-art photographer known for her series Young Americans, Plastic Bodies, and Suburbia. Her documentation of responses to police shootings in cities across the US inspired her book #1960Now: Photographs of Civil Rights Activists and Black Lives Matter Protests.
Inspired by W. E. B. Du Bois’s speech, “Behold the Land,” Sheila Pree Bright focuses her portrait lens on the Southern landscape, where she encounters personhood and spirit in the presence of the land. As she travels across her home state of Georgia, she is guided on a journey through sites of generational trauma and into a future rooted in joy.
“Here is the chance for young women and young men of devotion to lift again the banner of humanity and to walk toward a civilization which will be free and intelligent; which will be healthy and unafraid; and build in the world a culture led by black folk and joined by peoples of all colors and all races—without poverty, ignorance and disease!”
—W. E. B. Du Bois, “Behold the Land” (1946)
Behold the Land
I feel the ancestors calling as I journey into the land
Dirt and Blood
Broken families of generational trauma
Babies, Children, Husbands, Wives
Black bodies
Behold the Land
Where is the Love the Beauty the Justice
Feeling the spirits releasing us, Black joy
Behold the Land
Going to reset the clock in the Southern sun
I feel it in the air, a new start, a new foundation
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