The Hagedorn Foundation Gallery opened in April 2008, under the mentorship of Julian Cox, curator of photography at the Getty and High Museums. Since that time, the not for profit gallery’s intention has been to broaden the Atlanta audience’s basis for visual reference in photography and photo based art to artists who are concerned with the role of their work in the socio-political and cultural arenas.

Since February, we have presented a series of group exhibitions investigating the idea of self vs circumstance in our culture today. Changing Room: Womans Image, addressed female identity manufactured by our commodities culture. Boys Life/Play War, similarly investigates the sometimes bewildering male requisite for aggression, courage, virility, emphasized by an exhibition in our second gallery of constructed paintball arenas and war costuming by children of U.S. soldiers stationed in Iraq.

For future exhibitions, the gallery has been awarded the art event for the National Black Arts Festival here in Atlanta in August. For this exhibition, we are bringing together four renowned photographers whose subject is the African American experience: Dawoud Bey, Paul D’Amato, Wayne Miller and Malick Sidibe.