Tucked between two restaurants, this Columbus photo gallery holds hidden gems

The Do Good Fund photography gallery is an unassuming building on 12th Street in Columbus, sandwiched between two restaurants, My Boulange and The Black Cow. To the average passerby, it might look plain and unremarkable. Yet the stories inside are anything but.

The nonprofit gallery houses an extensive collection of over 800 photographs capturing glimpses of the South’s rich history in triumphs and tragedies. This collection functions as a living archive — open to public viewing for free and borrowing for a fee.

“The dirty secret is that most museums keep 95% of their collection in their basement at any one time,” Alan Rothschild, a Columbus lawyer and founder of The Do Good Fund, told the Ledger-Enquirer. “[I wanted to] collect contemporary photography and make it available to folks. Instead of hoarding it in our basement, let’s create this public collection and see if we can get folks interested in borrowing the work and sharing the work.”

Accessibility

Anyone can request to borrow photos from The Do Good Fund collection to conduct their own exhibit. The borrowing fee ranges from $500 to $2,000, which is much lower than market value, Rothschild said.

The Do Good Fund is designed this way, he said, to ensure money isn’t an impediment for under-resourced places who want to show the work and participate in the storytelling.

“One of our goals is to make sure that places … have access to what I hope are museum-quality photographs so people in these small towns can see these works and see these stories,” Rothschild said. “The work belongs to everyone. We love when people want to borrow it and share it.”

Rothschild established The Do Good Fund in 2012 after being inspired by Walker Evans’ and William Christenberry’s work documenting the Black Belt of Alabama.

What started as a collection of 50 photographs and a show at a vacant storefront on Broadway in Columbus exploded into a regional success. Now, the organization has completed over 100 shows in nine states, Rothschild said.

“Your life is fuller if you know something about your surroundings, whether it’s the environment or the history,” he said. “You don’t have to go somewhere else to find life’s stories. They’re all here. We just need to look for them. … The work is taken in the South, but the stories are universal.”

Southern photography

The Do Good Fund tries to collect photos from photographers who love what they do, Rothschild said. Most of the work in the collection is purchased, gifted or donated, he said. Some come from well-known photographers, while others come from those just starting.

The organization has an emerging photographer fund to find talent that hasn’t been widely publicized, The Do Good Fund collection manager Hallie Fivecoat told the Ledger-Enquirer.

“We try to have a collection that represents photographers of all walks of life,” she said. “So we really look for diversity, and we try very hard to make sure that we have women and photographers of color. We try very hard to have that representation because it also tells a much more interesting story, and that’s really important to us.”

Such a commitment to diversity and accessibility makes this gallery unique, Fivecoat said.

“We’re collecting work that no one else is collecting,” she said. “So I think we’re sharing stories and putting things out there in ways that no one else is really doing — trying to make it super accessible, trying to collect work that museums aren’t necessarily collecting.”

The gallery and the community

The Do Good Fund has worked with the Columbus Museum, the Bo Bartlett Center, the Department of Art at Columbus State University and other regional institutions. It also offers artist residency programs, internships and other opportunities for Chattahoochee Valley residents to get involved and get in touch with their Southern roots.

Columbus’ strong community base “adds to the cultural landscape in a really positive way,” Fivecoat said, and contributes to the mission of reaching as many people as possible with stories from the South.

“[The Do Good Fund] really helps show all the different facets and faces and stories that exist in the South, which has its own kind of unique character, its own place, its own folklore, its own traditions,” she said. “The South has a big, storied history, and it still lives through people today.”

The gallery on 12th Street, which has been open for four years, operates as a place to store the collection and as an exhibit space. It also hosts monthly speaking events with artists and occasionally exhibits art beyond photography, such as sculptures and quilts.

The Do Good Fund’s current exhibit is “The Seventh Bardo: a Meditation on the Modern Journey” by photographer Beth Lilly. It will be up until Aug. 23.

The next exhibit, titled “In Threes: Photographs by Maude Schuyler Clay, Langdon Clay and Sophia Clay,” will show the collective work of a family of photographers spanning several decades. It will be on display at the gallery from Aug. 28 through Nov. 1, with a public talk featuring the artists scheduled for Oct. 9.

For more information, visit thedogoodfund.org.