Tommy Kha, May (Madonna Sans Child), in Four Acts, East Memphis, Tennessee, 2021. Pigmented inkjet print. High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from Charles Jing, 2023.349

Tell the truth but tell it slant

Tell all the truth but tell it slant—
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind— 

By Emily Dickinson

Truth Told Slant is an exhibition currently on view at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta that “examines a recent shift in how photographers have taken on the challenge of making meaningful images of the world around them.” The show spotlights stylistic, expressive documentary photography by five practicing artists in the Southeast — Jill Frank, Rose Marie Cromwell, Zora J Murff, Tommy Kha, and Dodd alumna Kristine Potter (’01, BA in photography, BA in art history).

On April 12, the Lamar Dodd School of Art, in partnership with the High Museum of Art and the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, hosts a panel discussion with Jill Frank and Tommy Kha moderated by Humble Arts Foundation Director Jon Feinstein. This event, part of the Willson Center's 2024 Global Georgia public events series, is open to the public and takes place at 11 am in room S150. For those unable to attend the Athens-based program, the High Museum will host its own conversation event for the exhibition at the museum the following day.

Truth Told Slant | Conversation featuring artists from the High Museum of Art Photography Exhibition

Friday April 12, 11 am - noon

Lamar Dodd School of Art, S150

Jill Frank, Talent Show, Crying while Kicking (Noelle), 2019. Dye coupler print. Courtesy of the artist

About the exhibition

Truth Told Slant examines a recent shift in how photographers have taken on the challenge of making meaningful images of the world around them. Rather than using the traditional documentary approach of dispassionate observation, they work in a stylistically expressive manner akin to literary nonfiction, weaving between observational and narrative modes while embracing their own subjectivity.

The title of this exhibition, which is inspired by an Emily Dickinson poem, accentuates the sidelong and deeply personal approach these artists use to make sense of the current social and political landscape. The five artists gathered here—Jill Frank, Rose Marie Cromwell, Zora J Murff, Kristine Potter, and Tommy Kha—consider issues that documentary photographers have grappled with for decades and that remain pertinent today. They explore topics of American life, such as race and inequality; identity and sexual orientation; immigration and globalization; youth and coming of age; climate change and environmental justice; and the pervasiveness of violence, to reveal deeper truths and reframe prevailing narratives in a manner that is more felt than didactic.

About Jill Frank

Jill Frank’s portraits examine archetypes of youth, rites of passage, and the formation of identity. Her photographs complicate familiar rituals such as cotillion, talent shows, and homecoming dances, offering space to consider the nuance that is so often omitted from the tailored visual record of our lives. These events are often methodically recorded, making them seem trite and insignificant despite the personal weight they carry for those involved. By making meticulously rendered portraits of American youth during moments of celebration and triumph, Frank encourages a reconsideration of social roles and relations in teen life. The resulting photographs offer an uneasy sense of vulnerability and beauty. The scale and formality of her images emphasize a seriousness despite the inherent ephemerality of her subject’s performance and setting, reframing these moments as brave acts.

About Tommy Kha

Tommy Kha’s lilting photographs of his immediate and found families and his hometown of Memphis explore the intersections of personal identity, family history, and place. In South Portraits, Kha, a queer Asian American raised in the South, narrates the multiplicity of his identity. His mother and grandmother often appear as recurring characters in the form of fractional self-portraits to pose questions about what may be passed down from one generation to the next—culture, affectation, trauma? As the child of Vietnamese and Chinese immigrants, Kha considers the visibility and invisibility of immigrants in the United States. His images of Chinese restaurants, shrines, and kitschy interiors express feelings of dislocation to question how divergent identities fit into an evolving cultural landscape. Across these seemingly disparate scenes, his choice of subject and his deadpan compositions employ humor as a means of revealing the absurdity that underlies the ways people are othered.

About Jon Feinstein

Jon Feinstein is a Jewish photographer, curator and writer, and the co-founder of Humble Arts Foundation.

Jon has curated countless exhibitions over 15+ years at galleries and institutions including Photoville; Blue Sky Gallery, PDX; The Ogden Museum in New Orleans for PhotoNola; Glassbox and Photographic Center Northwest Seattle; Colorado Photographic Arts Center; and Barclays Arena in Brooklyn, NY for ArtBridge.

His projects have been featured in Aperture, NY Times, BBC, VICE, The New Yorker, Hyperallergic, and Feature Shoot, and he’s contributed to VICE, Hyperallergic, Aperture, Photograph, TIME, Slate, GOOD, Daylight, Adobe, and PDN.