Influenced by the New York City street photography of Gary Winogrand and Helen Levitt, Reuben Cox brings a similar sense of spontaneity and unobtrusiveness to his portraits, landscapes, and narratives of rural Southern American life. Less interested in documenting an event than reproducing the quality and drama of an experience, Cox has no primary subject matter and often changes focus drastically from series to series. He has conducted photographic studies of log cabins, life around a swimming hole, and drag queens. In “Bagatelle” (2010), he photographed his own orchestrated explosions of smoke with manual shutter release and high-powered flashes, creating semi-abstract images of the unrepeatable forms before they quickly dissipated into a mist, the conceptual underpinning and departure from documentary photography marking a significant deviation from Cox’s earlier work.