The exhibit Oraien Catledge: Cabbagetown, now on view at Opal Gallery, displays 30 of some 50,000 images taken by photographer Oraien Catledge in the small Atlanta neighborhood from the late 1970s through the ’90s. Here, Catledge discusses a few of the works in the show and some from his broader collection with CL’s Chad Radford and Opal Gallery director Connie Lewis.
ORAIEN CATLEDGE: The photographer holds up one of his images of Cabbagetown as he knew it more than 20 years ago.
Oraien Catledge first stumbled upon Cabbagetown while sitting on his couch one evening in the fall of 1978. He was flipping through the local news channels when he came across a town meeting in which citizens were discussing the fate of their community. The nearly 100-year-old Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills had closed their doors for the last time, and a lot of the locals – vestiges of an honest-to-goodness factory town that stood in the mills’ shadows – were destitute. Many of the people living in Cabbagetown in the late ’70s were direct descendents of the workers imported from Appalachia to work at the mills since their construction in 1881. But much of the property would soon be up for sale to the rest of the city, and it seemed that the tight-knit community would unravel. “As they used to say, that was preee-sactly the moment that I learned about Cabbagetown,” Catledge chuckles through a bushy, snowy white mustache.
Catledge, 81, is an Oxford, Miss., native who moved to Atlanta in 1969 while working as a regional consultant for the American Association for the Blind. “I wasn’t a photographer back then and I knew nothing about photography, but I had an urge to do something creative,” he says. “I tried painting but the canvases just wouldn’t dry fast enough, so I went out and I got a camera.”
Catledge is legally blind, but dismisses his condition as a disadvantage. In a soft, grandfatherly voice, he says, “Oh … I can see a lot better than most people think I can.”
Continue Reading “Photographer Oraien Catledge remembers Cabbagetown”
(Photos by Joeff Davis)
Breastplate by Flora Rosefsky
Add some extra excitement to this beautiful weekend by heading to these free art events. See what’s going on around town after the jump.
