Sheila Pree Bright’s quietly observant intelligence is in the details of her photographs of African American middle class suburbia.  Her enigmatically occupied spaces—faces casually obscured, bodies merely glimpsed or suggested—construct an evocative narrative of class and race in the twenty-first century.  They are at once familiar and surprising.  The authenticity of her observations, her ability to distill the interior landscape down to its visual essence, gives the photographs their resonance and authority.

Countering the prevalent extremes of media representation, Pree Bright represents a largely invisible population of the African American middle class, the modern-day “Talented Tenth.” A thoughtful photographer, her observations are on point, uniting her knowledge and perception of contemporary culture with her mastery of the medium in this challenging and provocative work.

Although “suburbia” was at one time virtually synonymous with “white flight,” Pree Bright’s Suburbia series depicts a far more complex reality.  Her images are as much about the assumptions of perception as about the construction of identity, the necessity of defining one’s self and one’s place through the accoutrements of class and culture. Not merely a prop, O is the new Ebony: the early twenty-first century symbol of “making it,” of getting over, of blurring distinctions where class trumps race.

Pree Bright’s work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions, including Saturday Night/Sunday Morning at The African American Museum of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, the traveling exhibition Reflections In Black: A History of Black Photographers 1840 to the Present, and Locating the Spirit: Religion and Spirituality in African American Art at the Smithsonian Anacostia Museum in Washington, D.C., and is included in public and private collections throughout the United States.

Her photographs have been published in Reflections in Black: A History of African American Photographers and, most recently, Black: A Celebration of a Culture. Pree Bright received her MFA in photography from Georgia State University.