Taking Shape

When I showed up with my camera at his house a few weeks later, I felt as if I had been training for that moment my entire working life. For more than forty years, in locations as disparate as the American South, Inuit villages in Alaska, Havana streets, and Hispanic towns in northern New Mexico, I learned to make portraits without the actual... See more

Harris – whose photographs are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Getty Museum and the High Museum in Atlanta – made a specialty of taking “portraits” in which the sitter does not appear, telling the story of a person by the rooms he or she occupies or the things they use daily. “I felt as if I had been training for this... See more

As longtime neighbors and friends who spent time in his house over many years, they show the ways in which the art and memorabilia Price collected inspired his writing and illuminates connections between the visible world he constructed and the creations of his mind.

My work then is what all honorable work is—the attempt to control chaos. It has freed me till now from physical want, from prolonged dependence on my fellows, and occasionally from myself. It has freed me for the attempt to understand, if not control, disorder in myself and in those I love. It has even freed me at times to participate in the... See more