Oraien Catledge was born in Sumner, Mississippi, in 1928, and came to his photographer's vocation near the end of a long career as a social worker in the state of Mississippi, and as an advocate for the blind throughout the South.

Although principally a photographer of people, Catledge's sensuous, fastidious black and white work documents the landscapes and cityscapes of Mississippi and New Orleans, as well as imagining and recording the insular, working-class lives of the Cabbagetown neighborhood in center-city Atlanta -- the signal achievement upon which his considerable reputation...