Mark Steinmetz is an American photographer who makes black and white photographs "of ordinary people in the ordinary landscapes they inhabit” and "in the midst of activity”. His work is held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hunter Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the New York Museum of Contemporary Photography, to name but a few. He is the recipient of numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship and his work has been exhibited in too many major museums and art galleries to list. He has produced 15 photobooks, such as South Central (2007), The Players (2015), Fifteen Miles to K-Ville (2015) and the Angel City West trilogy.

The most recent iteration of the High Museum of Art’s Picturing the South series features the work of Mark Steinmetz, originally from Athens, Georgia, who focused his project on Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. In one of the world’s most heavily trafficked airports, Steinmetz explores the paradox of the space as the crossroads of Southern identity, both in the mainstream and on the periphery. The sixty hazy, black-and-white photographs featured in the exhibition imagine the South in a new light, and ask questions about the future of southern photography.

One interview that Mark has done about Terminus says- "One of the things that interested Mark about the airport is that it is a liminal place where people are leaving one place behind and going off to another. Thinking more broadly or metaphorically, they could be leaving one chapter of their life behind and starting off on a new adventure. A lot of Mark’s work looks at people and places on the margins of the mainstream, and the edges of cities. He takes a lot of pictures on the road, particularly on highways. The highway becomes a metaphor for transition and a way of expressing a longing for something. The airport fits in perfectly—it is literally at the edge of the city; it’s something that despite its size and how busy it is, it’s still peripheral to our everyday thinking. The airport is so outside normal, everyday life for many people that they have a different kind of experience in the airport. In the pictures that Mark took of people, they’re almost completely lost in thought, often alone, or if they’re near other people, they are gazing out a window, or looking at their phone. They are lost in their own world, disconnected and lost in contemplation."