From Booklist
Novelist Pat Conroy fondly introduces this album of Jack Leigh's distinguished photographs by writing that the "South he captures is the one I have lived in my whole life and is as familiar to me as my thumbprint, yet I feel as though I am seeing my native land for the first time when I study Jack's 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 most famous photograph is the one of a Savannah cemetery statue, which graced the front cover of John Berendt's wildly popular book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1994). But all his shots evoke place and mood with heart-gripping force. His black-and-white images, at once softly textured and immaculately focused, emphasize the beauty of isolation, personal and geographic; but other shots celebrate the ties of community. An ordinary intersection in a small town holds our fascination; a fog-covered body of water brings out the romantic in the most hardened of hearts. Brad Hooper
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Book Description
This retrospective volume places Jack Leigh in the company of other documentary giants such as Walker Evans and Dorothea Lang. While technology and urban sprawl have transformed much of our country in the last half of the twentieth century, Jack Leigh has been quietly documenting the people and the landscape of the Southeastern coast, a region steeped in history and tradition. The Land I'm Bound To is the photographer's tribute to the richly diverse culture of his native region. His subjects range from solitary oystermen working the fog-shrouded salt marshes of South Carolina to shrimp fishermen at sea to the swamps and marsh flats along Georgia's Ogeechee River, as well as the massive cranes and freighters of Savannah's busy port. Here, Leigh is both inclusive and expansive, offering some of his most memorable images as well as recent work that synthesizes the beauty and emotional grip the South has on many of us. Foreword by Pat Conroy. 200 duotone photographs.


About the Author
Jack Leigh's previous photography books include Oystering: A Way of Life and Seaport: A Waterfront at Work. He lives in Savannah, Georgia.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The Land I'm Bound To is the photographer's tribute to the richly diverse culture of his native region. His subjects range from solitary oystermen working the fog-shrouded salt marshes of South Carolina to shrimp fishermen at sea to the swamps and marsh flats along Georgia's Ogeechee River, as well as the massive cranes and freighters of Savannah's busy port. Here, Leigh is both inclusive and expansive, offering some of his most memorable images as well as recent work that synthesizes the beauty and emotional grip the South has on many of us.

FROM THE CRITICS

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