Books
In Light of Everything
Radius Books, Santa Fe, USA, 2023.
Signed copies can be purchased from Radius Books
Debbie Fleming Caffery: In Light of Everything immortalizes in book form the artist’s first major career retrospective presented at the New Orleans Museum of Art. Examining the deep emotional relationship between people and place, Caffery is recognized as a leading photographer visualizing the American South. Her shadowy, blurred images thoughtfully feature elements of luster to reveal elements of the shared human experience—childhood, spirituality, labor—and ultimately bring darkness to light. This publication is her most comprehensive to date, showcasing projects produced within and beyond the American South to Mexico, France, and the American West. Caffery’s sixth title, In Light of Everything is the first to feature all series over the course of her career.
"Debbie Fleming Caffery (b.1948) was born in southwest Louisiana, where she lives and works today. Her photographs are housed in numerous collections, including the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, Center for Creative Photography, The Elton John Collection, George Eastman House, Harvard Art Museums, High Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Smithsonian Institute, and Whitney Museum of American Art. She has consistently shown in group exhibitions since 1973 and solo exhibitions since 1980. Caffery has received several grants and fellowships, such as the Guggenheim Fellowship, Fellowship from the Open Society Institute (George Soros Foundation), Lou Stouman Prize in Photography (Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego) and a commission from the High Museum of Art for their photography initiative Picturing the South. She has published five monographs, including The Spirit & the Flesh (Radius Books, 2009), Alphabet (2015), Polly (Twin Palms Press, 2004), The Shadows (Twin Palms Press, 2002), and Carry me Home (Smithsonian, 1990).
Alphabet
Fall Line Press, Atlanta, USA, 2015.
64 pp., 26 illustrations, 9x9"
This sumptuous hardbound edition features 26 black and white photographs, each corresponding with letters of the alphabet. Pulled from Caffery s deep archive, this book reimagines in an open and creative way that essential experience of every childhood our ABCs. A unique and beautiful book, able to reach hearts and minds through the playful interaction between the alphabet and photography.
"Debbie Fleming Caffery is considered one of the great contemporary photographers of the American South. Known for an exceptional and broad body of work, spanning haunting image of sugar cane harvesting in Louisiana to striking portraits and landscapes in Mexico and the Mississippi Delta, her picutres are collected by museums and art enthusiast around the world. The wonderful lyricism of her images evoke an open-ended sense of mystery that provides the perfect avenue through which to discove the possibilites of our surroundings and their creative relationship to the building blocks of language."
- Brett Abbott , Curator of Collections and Exhibitions
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Forth Worth, Texas
Polly
Author & Contributors
Twin Palms publishers
60 pages, 25 duotone plates, 9 x 10 inches
“Polly Joseph and Debbie Fleming Caffery are women of southern Louisiana. Together they formed an intimate, isolated bond initiated by photography and matured into an unlikely friendship. The details of Polly’s life, present and past, became a collection of fables Caffery drank in like the dust-filled air and the deep, articulated shadows that surrounded them. Caffery’s photographs transmit mystery and truth through the story, body, and home of Polly: they are a collective portrait of unspeakable power.”
— Trudy Wilner Stack.
Limited Editon
Edition of 25 copies laid in a clamshell box
8 x10 silver-gelatin photograph signed by the artist
Hurricane Images
13 black-and-white illustrations, 8x10"
www.photoeye.com
Under the auspices of a grant from the Open Society Initiative, native Louisianan Debbie Fleming Caffery explored the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina, a small portion of which is compellingly captured here. Focusing primarily on the Lower Ninth Ward, Caffery photographed the debris left behind in the wake of mass evacuations - wrecked cars, a steak knife and an eggshell, photographs tacked to walls, a pair of dentures - and the journey of many displaced residents from the overcrowded and increasingly dangerous New Orleans Convention Center and Superdome to a shelter in Baton Rouge.
The Shadows
10 x 12 inches, 45 tritone plates, 96 pages
www.twinpalms.com
“Debbie Fleming Caffery’s images can be seen as articles of faith. The relentless insistence of subject and symbol in these images is assuredly their greatest strength. This vigor results from a tension that can be both visual and emotional. In this marshy no-man’s-land between description and illusion, her photographs serve as an able guide to truths that are better sensed than seen.” — John Lawrence
“The subject matter of Debbie Fleming Caffery’s new work shifts from the mysterious and hard life of the Louisiana sugar culture to that of foreign imagery. The style of her photography remains the same. Light is never allowed to blind us to the darkness of human existence and its inexorable limitations. But neither is darkness allowed to swallow the bitter sweet moments of disclosure. She has found the spiritual, together with its enemies.” — James R. Watson
“The true artist always mixes the inner substance of the soul with the essence of the subject to derive droplets of imagery from the resultant alchemy. This magical process requires total involvement of the heart. Debbie Fleming Caffery’s work radiates the fusion of her personal passion with the emotional energy of her subjects. From this fundamental union comes the depth and power of her images.” — Francis Ford Coppola
Limited Edition also Available
Edition of 25 copies laid in a clamshell box
original print numbered and signed by the artist
Filigranes Editions / L'oiseau Rare
Filigranes Editions
Debbie Fleming Caffery became known in 1989 through an exhibition as part of the Rencontres d'Arles where she showed her work on the South of the United States (the Deep South), and in particular Louisiana where she lives today. A work at the crossroads of social documentation and personal interpretation of the traditions of this region: we talked about it about magical realism. It is in the same spirit, with the same freedom of writing, that she has made for several years, with her own children and during her travels to Mexico and Portugal, a large number of images that this book brings together today in the "the rare bird" collection.
The third in a fantastic little series from Filigranes Editions. Superbly edited, with numerous images that have rarely been seen before, this wonderful collection has text in French only.
— Debbie Fleming Caffery
Smithsonian Institution Press
In 1990, the Smithsonian published a softbound monograph on a photographer born and raised in Louisiana by the name of Debbie Fleming Caffery. Her dark, haunting images of sugar cane workers nearly overpowered the book, creating a yearning by all who purchased it to see more. But no publications were forthcoming, and the book, Carry Me Home, became one of the most sought after out-of-print books on the market.
Debbie Fleming Caffery has photographed sugar cane workers in her native southern Louisiana since the early 1970s. Her images convey the sense of mystery and foreboding that surrounds the sugarcane culture. Figures rise out of smoke and fire, a disembodied pair of legs marches out of the mist, menacing looking machines loom over the sugar mill. The photos in the second and third sections of the book are softer and more tender. Caffery's subjects here are her friend Polly, photographed in the almost total darkness of her one-room cabin in the woods, and Caffery's three children at play. The portraits of Polly and the still lifes of her few possessions are remarkable in their simplicity and intensity. The photos of Caffery's children reflect her young subjects' imaginations and rejoice in their games. This striking collection of silver prints, reproduced in rich duotone, is both a documentation of a particular way of life likely to vanish soon and a testament to its enduring significance.
