A new photography exhibition opening this week at the High Museum of Art invites visitors to reflect on the emotional weight of modern American life, from suburban expansion and political tension to climate anxiety and uncertainty about the future.
“Blazing Light Photographs by Mimi Plumb” opens Friday and marks the first solo museum exhibition of photographer Mimi Plumb’s work. The exhibition spans more than five decades, bringing together images made from the early 1970s through recent photographs created during ongoing drought conditions in the American West.
Although much of the work was made in California and across the West Coast, Plumb said the themes extend well beyond geography. “The things that I’m looking at are things that are affecting all of us,” she said during a walkthrough of the exhibition. “It’s speaking about what life looks like when you live on the edge of the city, and what the environment looks like. Climate change is what that looks like. The threat of nuclear war, what that feels like.”
Curator Gregory J. Harris said those concerns resonate just as strongly today as when many of the photographs were first made. “A lot of the work deals with really pressing issues that I think are pretty relatable to people,” Harris said. “This idea of political tension, cultural difference, and instability. The world is changing really quickly, and that’s disorienting.”
The exhibition is organized around three major bodies of work. The earliest photographs were made when Plumb was a teenager, documenting suburban development outside San Francisco. Images of teenagers wandering construction sites and unfinished neighborhoods capture a sense of boredom and alienation as optimism about progress begins to fade.
“When Mimi was making these pictures, she was only a couple of years older than most of the teenagers who are in the photographs,” Harris explained during the tour. That closeness, he said, creates “a real sense of empathy and connection” rather than distance.
Later sections of the exhibition move into darker territory, examining environmental damage and the growing presence of military and industrial infrastructure. Harris pointed to images that juxtapose historic homes with construction debris and highways as reflections on the tension between past and present and what that means for the future.
Recent photographs taken near a drought-stricken reservoir continue those themes. Plumb said she sees those images as extensions of the anxieties she felt decades earlier. Harris agreed, noting that the feeling of urgency has only intensified. “I feel more anxious now than I did in the 80s,” he said. “Back then, it felt like we still had time to change things. Now it feels more pressing.”
Despite the heaviness of the subject matter, Harris said the work offers a kind of reassurance. “The pictures give shape to these really amorphous emotions,” he said. “Being able to look at them helps you wrap your head around what it’s like to live in discordant times.”
Plumb added that younger viewers have been especially drawn to the work. “Young people really made my work,” she said, explaining that many see their own fears reflected in images made decades earlier.
“Blazing Light” is on view through May 10.