maus contemporary - Sonja Rieger

Rally
October 28, 1979, 7pm, Gardendale, AL

In 1979, photographer Sonja Rieger had just moved from New Jersey to begin teaching at UAB when she got the opportunity to take some shots at a Klan rally in Gardendale, Alabama. Those photos are being exhibited for the first time, and although the images of burning crosses and Klansmen are powerful documents in their own right, Rieger has chosen to juxtapose huge scans of the shots with equally large digital images she has taken of clouds and sky. This remarkable juxtaposition greatly enhances and elaborates the undeniable cinematic quality of the photographs. It’s as though she has located, after decades, the proper scale on which her Klan images most effectively engage the viewer.

“I would not say I am humanizing the Klan,” Rieger notes, “but I am putting the whole experience of it—every little detail—out there for the viewer. I am trying to present a deeper view. That rally had an indelible impact on me; it could not be erased. I think a sense of that is in the photographs at this scale.”

Rieger’s images of cloud formations (she connects October skies with the time of year the Klan rally took place) are at once bold and pastoral, bringing to mind the big skies of 19th century landscape painting and the contemplative cinema of Terrence Malick or Michelangelo Antonioni. There may be a hint of gathering storms in those cloud formations, which find analogies in close-up shots of smoke billowing from a burning cross. The exhibition’s central image of Klansmen and spectators gathered around the Imperial Wizard lends the immediacy of news footage from the Civil Rights era, or the stark realism of documentary works by D. A. Pennebaker and the Maysles brothers. The combined imagery of cloud formations and Klan rally, presented on such a scale and with the movement/drama of motion pictures, recalls Storm Warning (1951), Hollywood’s first critical (if timid) depiction of the Klan in the South, starring a politician who would reach the White House two years after these photos were taken.

In that context, perhaps Rieger’s stunning images leave us to wonder precisely who is being warned here. Although one Klansman in the central photo offers a menacing glance directly at the camera, he doesn’t know he’s just a few years away from the Southern Poverty Law Center’s landmark lawsuit that bankrupted the Klan; less than five years from Jesse Jackson’s galvanizing address to the Democratic National Convention; six years from Michael Jackson taking over pop music; and only a generation away from America’s first Black president. Nonetheless, although the subjects of these photos are, culturally speaking, galaxies away from us now, Rieger momentarily convinces us that the distance is actually about ten feet across the room.

two vintage prints were included in the exhibition:


					St. James 2009 archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308 edition of 3 + 1 AP 45 by 30 in. (on 51 by 36 in. paper)						St. James 2009 archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308 edition of 4 + 1 AP 36 by 24 in. (on 42 by 30 in. paper)