Sheila Pree Bright photographed by Andrew J Clark
Sheila Pree Bright: Material Culture
by Carol Senf
Sheila Pree Bright, Suburbia/Untitled 12, 2005, Archival Pigment Prints, © Sheila Pree Bright
Photographer Sheila Pree Bright grew up on a series of military bases where she felt she “never belonged,” but that feeling of not belonging disappeared when she took a photography class during her senior year at the University of Missouri. The camera provided the shy young woman with a way to present the world both to herself and to her viewers. Generally described as a photographer or sometimes an art photographer, Bright has produced an evolving body of work that includes portraits, landscapes, creative interpretations, murals, books, and artist talks. These various bodies of work may appear very different at first glance, but they are connected by a series of common threads: community, identity, memory, belonging.
Adults who grew up as military dependents (aka army brats) often describe the experience as a mixed bag. Moving frequently can provide a multicultural perspective that makes military dependents comfortable with new people and new surroundings, but they often describe feeling rootless because they are from everywhere and nowhere. Particularly challenging is the difficulty in forming strong childhood friendships or staying connected with extended family who live across the country or even on another continent and adjusting to a new school every three years is a special challenge for shy children. While their deployed parents are provided with an automatic community and a shared mission, the kids are left to fend for themselves as the parents also adjust to a new set of living arrangements.
Growing up in a military family meant that Sheila and her siblings (an older brother and two sisters) moved every three years from Waycross, Georgia where she was born, to Heilbronn, Germany, where she lived from age three to age seven, to Army bases in Kansas, Colorado, and New York until her father retired as master sergeant of the Army and brought his family back to Waycross. The result of all this moving around as a child and young adult, and of living in a variety of places, was that Bright never had a sense of belonging. She remembers being a young child in Germany when people, unfamiliar with people of African heritage, asked her mother if they could touch her hair. That experience, which for another person could have been negative, caused Bright, who describes herself as a bookish child, to be curious about both herself and the diversity of the world that surrounded her. After college in Missouri, she moved to Houston where her brother was living and used her camera to explore African American culture by photographing the hip-hop community before returning to Georgia to study photography at Georgia State University, from which she earned her MFA in 2003.
Sheila Pree Bright, Left to right: Young Americans/Irene, 2008, Plastic Bodies/Self- Portrait, 2007, Young Americans/Vivian, 2007, Archival Pigment Prints, © Sheila Pree Bright
Bright was supported by her father who encouraged her curiosity by buying books and taking the family to museums and other cultural locations as they moved across Europe and the United States. He also paid her tuition to graduate school at GSU. During this period, when she learned about the history and craft of photography, she worked on several early projects to try to understand both herself and the father who had nurtured both her curiosity and her creativity. The first of these projects focused on the Vietnam War, and she hoped that her father, who had served two tours in Vietnam, would share his experiences, but the most she got was his confession, “I had to do what I had to do.” The second series, Plastic Bodies, which eventually became her Master’s thesis, used the iconic Mattel toy to reflect on the stark contrast between the idea of beauty embodied in Barbie and African American notions of female beauty.
Bright admits that she is rarely without a camera and, while she has used both digital and analogue cameras over the course of her career, she is now shooting some series on film, a practice that she says, “slows me down because I need to adjust the various settings on the camera to connect with the person or place that I am photographing.” While taking a camera with her everywhere means that she is always ready to shoot what she sees (she’s currently shooting images of Waffle House restaurants), not every photograph winds up as part of a major body of work. She explains, “I’m not sure where I’m going with Waffle House, and I wasn’t sure that the body of work now called Gathering would become a body of work, but it did, and I am continuing to work on it.
Sheila Pree Bright, Where We Gather, 2026, Archival Pigment Prints, © Sheila Pree Bright
In addition to using different kinds of cameras, Bright also works in both color and black and white film, and she explains that one factor in her decision to use one or the other involves the subjects of the works, adding that both #1960Now and Invisible Empire were shot in black and white because she was exploring memory and our continued relationship to the past. On the other hand, Gathering and Young America (2008) had to be in color because they explore the present and look to a brighter future.
While Bright’s photographs received local attention almost from the beginning of her career, she first received national acclaim in 2006 when she won the Center Prize at the Santa Fe's CENTER (for photography) for Suburbia, a body of work that focuses on African Americans in the suburbs. Even though Bright had been aware of race since her childhood in Germany when people wanted to touch her hair, and knew that her father wanted to go to Georgia Tech, which was still segregated at the time, she explains that while her first explorations of race in her hip-hop portraits and Plastic Bodies had looked at racial differences, Suburbia takes the African American experience out of the ghetto and into suburban areas that are filled with art and books about art as well as the toys and sports experiences that unify rather than divide American culture.
Sheila Pree Bright, 1960#Now, 2015, Archival Pigment Prints, © Sheila Pree Bright
While Suburbia features familiar examples of material culture and is almost entirely devoid of people, aside from family photographs, Bright’s next major body of work 2008, Young Americans focuses on its human subjects and counters the sometimes-negative depiction of Millennials. The project, which began when Barack Obama was running for office in 2007 and 2008, is a series of portraits of young people that resulted from Bright’s trips across the US. While Bright found some of these young people and some of them found her, all the portraits reflect the input she received from the subjects. Bright discussed patriotism with them and gave them an American flag, but they provided other props and posed with the flag to express their own sense of identity. As a result, the portraits express the uniqueness of each subject: Jenny Liu, an Asian American, covers half of her face with the flag and comments that she doesn’t feel that she belongs. Mari Agory wrapped herself protectively in the flag and notes that she would be dead if she weren’t in America; and Edwin reveals his joint identity as a citizen of the United States and of Puerto Rico by featuring both flags along with references to his military experience. The body of photographs that was collected in Young Americans was published as a book in 2017 and also became a series of murals and is a direct response to the negativity that is often associated with Millennials. Revealing that she is trying to keep up with all the young people that she came to know while creating the project, Bright concludes that the project as a whole reveals the subjects’ love of the US rather than their negativity.
Bright’s next project is the result of her combining two different bodies of work, both of them focusing on civil rights, and continuing her exploration of racism in the United States. She began working on the project in 2013 by creating portraits of various civil rights leaders of the 1960s, including Dr. Roslyn Pope, Lonnie King, Herman Russel, Charles Person, and Claire O’Connor, and by learning from their experiences. Later, when the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner led to the Black Lives Matter Movement in 2014 and 2015, she connected the activism of the two movements. In contrast to the individual portraits, the BLM photographs show group activity and focus mainly on young people in the streets though the series also includes images from the funeral of John Lewis on Thursday, July 30, 2020, presided over by Raphael Warnock, Georgia Senator and pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, the church Martin Luther King also led. In addition to the body of photography, Bright’s exploration of civil rights also resulted in #1960Now, a book published in 2018 that creates a dialogue between two important groups of civil rights leaders. The book, which is introduced by BLM co-founder Alicia Garza, contains writing by Deborah Willis, Aaron Bryant, and Kiche Griffin. The black and white photographs used throughout the book emphasize both the historical quality of the 1960s portraits and reinforce the journalistic immediacy of the more recent protest movement.
Sheila Pree Bright, A Flag, 2019, Archival Pigment Prints, © Sheila Pree Bright
At the same time she was working on #1960Now, Bright was also working on a very different project, Invisible Empire, also shot using black and white film because it evokes the past. While #1960Now features people who stood up to persistent racism in the United States, Invisible Empire focuses on a place associated with that racism, Stone Mountain, Georgia, the location of a controversial monument to the Confederacy as well as the place where the KKK was re-established in 1915, after lying dormant during the Reconstruction Period. The title for this body of work comes from W.E.B. Dubois, who used the phrase “invisible empire” to characterize an underground network of white supremacy and terrorism that dominated the American South. Bright, however, also points to another aspect of the phrase for DuBois, who opened his essay, “Georgia: Invisible Empire State,” which was published in The Century Magazine in 1924, with two paragraphs that extoll Georgia’s underappreciated natural beauty. Bright reflects on the subjects, noting that “Stone Mountain is beautiful,” and the photographs in Invisible Empire evoke both the natural beauty of the land and the historical ugliness of persistent racism. The double-sided images evoke a complex truth that viewers should recognize.
While Invisible Empire focuses on the Georgia landscape and includes both images from nature as well as photographs of the controversial monument, it also includes an image of her father’s bible open to Romans. Simply titled Bible, the photograph recognizes the father who had grown up in the Jim Crow South and whose life had been shaped by that experience. Other photographs evoke the past, including Cotton, Rope, and A Flag with no other commentary. The final photograph in this body, which shows a road moving into the light, is titled, There Is A Future.
Because Bright takes her camera with her everywhere, she continues to take photographs that may or may not wind up in entirely new bodies of work. In fact, while her most recent body of work, Gathering, might appear finished to the casual observer, Bright is continuing to work on it by researching the place of sport in Greece and Rome. Unlike the two previous bodies of work which were shot in black and white, Gathering is shot in glorious colors and features images that evoke all aspects of sport from the individual spectator to the athletes themselves, to the locations where sports take place. Bright observes that, while sport is often described as competition, it also brings people together. “In that way, it’s like church.” Bright started this body of work by photographing soccer games and soccer spectators and later moved on to other sports. What she discovered in the process was the human connection among diverse groups of athletes and their fans. For someone who grew up with a natural curiosity about other cultures, sport reveals a great deal about the threads that run through her life and work: community, identity, memory, belonging. The surface images of Gathering are all about the human connections that result when people go to a physical location to support their favorite team, though there can be a darker side to the experience, and Bright comments thoughtfully on the colonial emphasis on soccer, as well as some of the aggressive behavior of fans to the opposing team. Like so much in life, sport is complicated and documenting that complexity provides Bright with a unique challenge. The images that Bright photographs are joyous, but many viewers will be aware of another side. Since Gathering is still very much a work in progress, followers of Bright’s bodies of work will naturally be curious to see what she includes in the final work. The little girl who felt that she didn’t belong when she and her family were moving from one military base to another has become a mature artist who trusts her viewers’ ability to respond to her photographs. As viewers, we can be almost certain that Bright’s future work will connect artist and viewers in a shared community that is willing to reveal the complicated truth about human history and work toward a future that doesn’t divide people into “Us” and “Them,” but instead brings us together.
Carol Senf
Atlanta, Georgia
September 2026
Sheila Pree Bright, Suburbia/Untitled 27, 2006, Archival Pigment Prints, © Sheila Pree Bright
Sheila Pree Bright is an International Lens-based artist and the mind behind the celebrated book #1960Now: Photographs of Civil Rights Activists and Black Lives Matter Protests. Bright's expansive bodies of work weave deep insights into contemporary culture. Her iconic series include Plastic Bodies, Suburbia, #1960Now, Invisible Empire, Young Americans, and an evocative portrayal of the 90s Hip Hop scene.
Her work is included in the book and exhibition Posing Beauty in African American Culture. She appeared in the 2014 documentary Through the Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People and in the 2016 film Election Day: Lens Across America. Among the prestigious spaces that have exhibited her works are the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in DC, High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Saatchi Gallery in London, The Art Gallery of Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA, and the International Center of Photography, New York.
Her various photographic series are housed in several prominent archival collections: Hip Hop is part of the Woodson Research Center, Special Collections & Archives at Rice University's Fondren Library; Plastic Bodies and Suburbia are held by the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University; and #1960Now is archived at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University. https://www.sheilapreebright.com
Sheila Pree Bright
Photo:Deanna Sirlin
Carol Senf, who recently retired from the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech (US), spent much of her career exploring nineteenth-century women writers, including the Brontes, George Eliot, and New Woman writers. She has also written on Dracula and its creator, Bram Stoker: Dracula: Between Tradition and Modernism, The Paradigm of Dracula: 100 Years of Evolution, Dracula, Blood, and the New Woman, Blue Books, Baedekers, Cookbooks, and the Monsters in the Mirror: Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Carol Senf
From Service to Self-Expression: Veterans in the Arts is a series of articles and "live" conversations on artists who have served, who are from military families, or whose work is about the military. On September 17, 2026 Sheila Pree Bright and Carol Senf presented a dialogue with the community at the at the American Legion Post 201 in Alpharetta, Georgia.