Debbie Fleming Caffery

Debbie Fleming Caffery’s photographs capture moments of rich beauty in the people and places of Mexico and the American South. A native of Louisiana, Caffery is most comfortable in the shadows, drawn to movements, patterns and deep tonality.

For several years during the mid-1990s, Debbie Fleming Caffery spent time photographing in a small village in northeastern Mexico, living on the grounds of the local Catholic church, and using a tortilla shack as her studio. In Mexico, the church is the center of village life, and she became accustomed to the flow of life surrounding it, replete with celebrations of religious feasts and the mysteries and secrets of community life.

Caffery’s latest project The Spirit & The Flesh balances the themes of grace and redemption, sin and forgiveness that Caffery encountered in Mexico and that held her in their sway. Her black-and-white photographs are themselves rich in contrast and unabashedly sensuous, deftly documenting the turbulent emotional landscape. Her wholehearted visual acuity suffuses the work, and represents an engagement with both the subject matter as well as a range of human emotion rarely seen in contemporary work.