GRAND 'OL EXHIBIT: Photos feature flag, symbolism

In a society that takes its symbols seriously, few symbols are more emotionally loaded and potentially contentious than the U.S. flag. Photographer Sheila Pree Bright of Atlanta employs this fact to her advantage in the portrait photographs that make up "Young Americans," her solo exhibition at Winston-Salem State University's Diggs Gallery.

Bright, 39, is an Atlanta-based photographer who has developed a reputation for creating serial bodies of work exploring aspects of identity. Her photographs deal with ethnicity, gender and -- in "Young Americans" -- both generational identity and national affiliation. Her aim in this series was to portray young adults from 18 to 25 posed with the U.S. flag in ways that reflect something about their self-images and their feelings about the United States.

While in Atlanta in 2007, shortly after Bright began work on "Young Americans," Belinda Tate, the Diggs Gallery's director and curator, visited Bright's studio. Tate convinced Bright to come to Winston-Salem State and photograph some of its students for her new project. In November of that year Bright followed up on the suggestion, photographing 15 of the university's students posed with a large U.S. flag against a white backdrop.

Diversity

Seeking to portray subjects from diverse backgrounds and socioeconomic groups, Bright also made photographs for the project in Atlanta and at several other colleges and universities across the country. Of 110 photographs she made in seven months, 34 are included in the exhibition, which debuted in May 2008 at Atlanta's High Museum of Art. It traveled to the Amistad Center for Art & Culture at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn., and the University of California-Irvine before it arrived at Diggs.

Bright worked with the High Museum's photography curator Julian Cox to make the final selection of images, and she had them printed in two sizes -- 40-by-30 inches and 65-by-48 inches -- a strategy that lends visual variety to the show.

Among the traveling show's 34 photographs are portraits of five Winston-Salem State students. Added exclusively for the show's Winston-Salem appearance are 15 smaller, 20-by-16-inch prints representing all of the Winston-Salem State students that Bright photographed. As a result, photographs of five Winston-Salem State students appear at the Diggs twice, in two different sizes. A color-illustrated, 68-page catalog reproduces all 34 images from the traveling show and six others that Bright chose.

The "Young Americans" portraits are collaborations in the sense that Bright let her subjects choose what to wear, how to pose and how to interact with the flag. She also tape-recorded her subjects discussing their ideas and feelings about the United States. She used excerpts from these recordings in a multi-media component of the show, which also includes projected images, texts, related mass-media materials and information on the official protocol for displaying and handling the flag.

Wrap it up

It's interesting to note that a number of subjects in the exhibited photographs chose to literally drape or wrap themselves in the flag. Maybe they weren't aware of this act's traditional symbolic associations as a figure of speech. (When a politician is said to have "wrapped himself in the flag," it indicates an excessive show of patriotism, often for self-interested motives.) In any case, Bright's flag-wrapped or flag-draped subjects obviously intended to communicate a different message, in most cases conveying a sense of comfort in their relationship to the country. For example, Kathryn Agnes Baczeski, a 20-year-old white woman, was photographed lying down, wrapped in the flag as if it were a comfortable old quilt and looking as if she just awakened from a peaceful sleep.

And Terence Walker, an African American student at Winston-Salem State, telegraphs his religious affiliation in his portrait. He has draped the flag over his back like a cape as he kneels, joins his hands as if praying and gazes piously heavenward. As a finishing touch, a gleaming chromium Jesus medallion hangs conspicuously from his neck.

Another Winston-Salem State student, QuanAsia Williams, conveys an ominously evocative message by lying supine atop a neatly draped flag in Bright's portrait of her. With her eyes closed and her hands crossed over her chest, Williams appears to mimic a corpse awaiting burial.

Both Kristen Alexis Kucks and Kolin Robinson neatly folded the flag in preparation for their portraits, which convey two very different messages. Demurely dressed in an old-fashioned flower-patterned dress and a white sweater, Kucks smiles and proffers the folded flag as if it were a tray of hors d'oeuvres. The more casually attired Robinson, on the other hand, placed the folded flag on the floor before posing with his back turned to it -- a gesture of skeptical ambivalence.

At a time when young Americans continue to fight and die in two controversial wars supposedly waged to support the values that the flag symbolizes, Bright's exhibition has special relevance. Her striking photographs stimulate thoughtful meditation on such issues.

Sheila Pree Bright's "Young Americans" is on view at Winston-Salem State University's Diggs Gallery through March 6. For more information, call 750-2458.