Jack Leigh’s Lens on Summer in the South

The late photographer Jack Leigh is most famous for his eerie black-and-white image of the Bird Girl statue commissioned for the cover of the book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. The Savannah native also had a knack for memorializing the Southern sensations of heat and humidity, as seen in the following pictures of shrimp boats, ancient trees dripping in moss, and a baptism in the cooling waters of the Ogeechee River. A new exhibition of his work, The Light, the Heat: Summer in the South, runs through September 1 at the newly expanded Laney Contemporary Fine Art in Savannah. See a sneak preview of the photographs here.