Oraien Catledge
Picture Man
October 7 - December 22, 2022
Oraien Catledge: Picture Man
October 7 - December 22, 2022
Lexington, KY
Institute 193 is pleased to announce Picture Man, the gallery’s first solo exhibition of works by Oraien Catledge, featuring a series of black and white photographs made and printed by the artist between 1980 and 1989. The exhibition takes its title from a nickname given to Catledge by the residents of Cabbagetown, a neighborhood in Atlanta, Georgia and the subject of his weekly Sunday trips wherein he would take portraits of the area’s residents.
One of Atlanta’s oldest industrial neighborhoods, Cabbagetown was formed for the workers of the South’s first textile processing mill, who moved to the area seeking a better paycheck and life. By the time Catledge arrived in 1980, the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill had closed and the economy weakened. As Catledge sought to archive candid interactions, he offered a grace and nobility to a community left reeling.
Catledge described his connection to this place and its people in his written “Self-Portrait,” published alongside the first collection of his work in 1984:
“The streets of Cabbagetown are narrow and the children play on some of them; traffic makes some streets too dangerous. There is a park, a small one, more a play lot for the children than a real park. There are no public schools within the boundaries of Cabbagetown, no clinics, no libraries, no picture shows. The most important institution outside the families was the “Factory,” the cotton mill where many of the community’s residents worked till its sudden closing more than a decade ago.
The mill was Cabbagetown’s provider, a beautiful working place, a place of pride. Not long ago I was able to walk through it, as it exists now. I saw large rollers with tongues of torn cloth hanging from them. I saw rows of sewing machines emasculated from dangling power cords. I saw huge floor spaces filled only with flakes of fallen white paint—a permanent winter. I saw a single sweater, forgotten, arms hanging over a valve. I saw hats the workmen had worn, probably all bowled in the same direction the day they left the factory for the last time. I saw chimneys once fed by boilers three stories high, now choked by piles of black energy at their bases.
The mill is still now. But some of the people remain.
The people call me “Picture Man.” They know I care about them—they are not sure why. They are used to me. They know I can be trusted, that I won’t butt in, won’t report their secrets or their names even in the book of my pictures they have heard is to be published. They must know that I remain irresistibly drawn to photograph them, even now that I cannot manage to come to Cabbagetown every weekend as I used to. Cabbagetown is a magnet to me, the need to photograph there as fiercely compelling as ever.”
– Oraien Catlege, 1984
Oraien Catledge (American, 1928 – 2015) was born and raised in Tutwiler, a small town in the Mississippi Delta that he described succinctly: “Cotton grew to the edge of the town in every direction. You knew the people around you, had sat on their front porch swings, could name the pictures on their parlor walls.” After receiving his Bachelor’s degree in 1954, he began work with the Mississippi Department of Public Welfare, substituting for short-term vacancies of other personnel across the state and later administering a small county welfare office. In 1969, Catledge and his family moved to Atlanta, Georgia where he became the southeastern regional consultant for the American Foundation for the Blind. In the late 1970s, he learned to use a camera and pursued his newfound passion intensely, despite his own visual impairments caused by an undiagnosed case of malaria he had contracted as a child. Up until his passing in 2015, Catledge took thousands of photographs, but his focus was primarily the residents of Cabbagetown, a place that undoubtedly transformed his way of seeing.