Unless noted all images ©Al Satterwhite
Eleven
This is Dek Unu Magazine. In Esperanto, dek unu means "eleven." Eleven images from a single artist. Eleven artists in eleven solo issues each year.
Dek Unu publishes the work of a new photoartist in each issue. The artist's work and words are featured alone and in individual focus as the sole purpose for each issue of the magazine. Unlike other arts and letters magazines which might look for work from a variety of artists to support an editorial staff's theme, at Dek Unu, theme and imagery are always each artist's own.
This edition of Dek Unu includes images from Southern Exposure, Al Satterwhite's newest book project, selected from an archive of over 800 images, drawn from the first few years of a career that has spanned over 60 years. The project, outtakes from Satterwhite's work as a news photographer and from his wanderings around the South, collects sights from daily life in the Sixties, showing what has changed and what has not.
Someone said that the way to make a good photograph is to put it in a drawer and look at it again in 30 years. That technique doesn’t work for every image; it is not nostalgia alone. The snapshots in that high school yearbook or the pix in a box full of photos discovered in an amateur picture clicker's basement, while they might provoke wistful memories, are not necessarily improved by a few decades of aging. But some images, made with the right combination of craft and vision, not only last, but age to perfection. The photos included in Southern Exposure haven’t changed, but their technical fit and finish endures, and the moment when they're seen provides a brand-new context; by art’s magic, the particular fades and the universal appears.
Al Satterwhite’s news photographs, often originally created for the next morning’s edition, have, after 19,000 mornings, become something else again. Not only do they remind us of those days, but they tell an even better story now.