Art Basel Miami + Art Miami -- Is Miami in the South?

The Art World has come to Miami and Miami Beach for the annual Art Miami and Art Basel Miami Beach shows. And I do mean the Art World. Here is a list of galleries showing work at Art Basel Miami, a list that includes galleries from locales far distant from Miami, ranging from Paris, Munich, and London to NYC, Chicago, and San Francisco.

There is a lot of photography on offer here, much of it inspired, as so much of the fine art photography world seems to be right now, by the German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher and their students and fans, practitioners of typological photography, documentarians of all the ways the same thing can look.

One example of this concern for sameness is the image above, by Robert Volt, shown at Art Miami by the Amador Gallery of NYC. It is one of a series of his images all showing a cell phone tower made to look, sort of, like a tree. Go HERE for nine of his images, all of the same thing, shot under the same light, and composed in exactly the same way. 

Could there be a way of doing typological photography in the South? Given what some have called our interest in human beings and their differences, even the nuances of difference, even eccentricity, as a defining condition of life, is it possible that we are at a defining moment in the concept of southernness in fine art photography?

Has anyone photographed a series of images of all the ways kudzu can take over a landscape? Is it time?