Matt Eich -- 2010 Emerging Photographer, Photo District News

Matt Eich, a Norfolk, Virginia based photographer, has been included in the 2010 list of "30 New and Emerging Photographers to Watch" by PDN (Photo District News).

Matt studied photojournalism at Ohio University and now works as a freelance photographer. In 2009 he won the Pictures of the Year International (POYI) Community Awareness Award and the Magenta Foundation's Bright Spark Award. He was also a finalist for the W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography. Already in 2010 he has been awarded the Juried Fellowship at the Houston Center For Photography,

Matt's work is congruent with many Southern concerns. He says his work is "rooted in memory, both personal and collective." He believes that stories are the fabric of history and that they have the power to inform and transform. Also, his current documentary project deals with the communities of alligator people in Louisiana. Can't get more Southern than that. 

I've mentioned Matt before on this blog as a member of the Luceo Images group of photographers, most of whom are Southerners. Their blog is a good place to keep up with work by all these guys.

Congratulations to Matt, truly a Southern Photographer to Watch Out For.

Alison Overton at 12 12 Gallery

Raleigh-based photographer Alison Overton is having a solo show of her work this summer at 12 12 Gallery, 12 E 12th St in  Richmond, Virginia, opening on Sunday, June 27th, 2010, with a reception from 2 - 5 pm. The exhibit runs from June 27th - August 7th.

Alison will also have a show of this work in the Foundations Gallery of the Gregg Museum of Art and Design on the NC State University campus, opening with a public lecture by Alison on June 9th, from 6 - 7 pm.

Alison works chiefly with Holgas and alternative imaging processes and traditionally has spent a lot of time hanging out in cemeteries, castles, and forests. Making contemporary the concerns of the Southern Gothic tradition, her work from the beginning has an etherial, eerie quality, an approach to her subjects that has carried over from her black and white and toned work into her more recent color work.

Some of her images are shot on Holgas which are not fully advanced between shots so images overlap into long, continuous frames that often contain multiple images of the same object seen from different angles. Her more recent work seems to be about compositions of masks, dolls, flowers, and dead rabbits.

Alison has a degree from NC State's Design School and has studied at the renowned Penland School of Crafts. She lives in Raleigh and is part of the ArtSpace Artist's Collective in downtown Raleigh. She has exhibited her work throughout the southeast and across the country.

Alison is definitely a Southern Photographer to Watch Out For.

Christopher Sims at SF CameraWork

Christopher Sims, Durham-based Southern Photographer to Watch Out For, has a show of his work from the series Theater of War: Pretend Villages of Iraq and Afghanistan now up at SF CameraWork, 657 Mission Street in San Francisco. The show opened May 6th and is up through August 7th, 2010.

The Press Release for Chris' show is here.

Sims is the recipient of the 7th annual Baum Award for Emerging American Photographers. His winning portfolio depicts places inside the USA that serve as fake locations set up to train American troops for war in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the Americans who pretend to be Iraqi and Afghani friends and foes to provide some sort of interactive quality to the simulations. 

Chris documents a surreal world in which cheaply and quickly put-together mosques and temples dot distinctively American landscapes. We are in his work backstage in the war on terror, revealing it to be a strange kind of living video game, a dramatic entertainment with actors and audience.

Laura Noel in PHOTONEWS

Laura Noel, Atlanta-based Southern Photographer to Watch Out For, has published work from her Deliver Me, portraits of smokers Portfolio in the May 2010 issue of PHOTONEWS, a German fine art photography magazine. 

Her work is featured in an article about the magazine's discoveries of strong new work at Houston's FotoFest.

Laura has an uncanny ability to capture the gestures and postures and situations of contemporary life in the South.

This work documents a profound change in Southern culture, at least in the upper South, where the growing of tobacco and the production and consumption of cigarettes has defined and supported large portions of Southern culture for generations.

Working-class Southerners defined their lives around the growing of tobacco and the rhythm of the seasons of working tobacco, culminating in the annual trip to the tobacco auction that made the difference between austerity and comfort for the year ahead. Wealthier Southerners used the profits of tobacco to build mansions and to fund institutions like Duke University and Wake Forest University.

Now, as Laura documents, Southern smokers of all classes and backgrounds cluster together at the margins of life in the New South.

Shoot' n Southern: Women Past and Present at the Mobile Museum of Art

Seventy women photographers with Southern connections are featured in a new show called Shootin' Southern: Women Past and Present at the Mobile Museum of Art. It opened on April 30th and is up until July 18th, 2010. This large, rich show includes a great host of fine work, including the image shown above, Caroline Davis' And Since I Could Not See For The Glory Of That Light, Being Led By The Hand Of Those Who Were With Me (1999).

This show features work by older photographers including Eudora Welty, Rosalie McKenna, Frances Johnston, and Lois Slosson Sundberg, as well as by a host of contemporary shooters, including Sally Mann, Laura Noel, Debbie Fleming Caffrey, Sheila Pree-Bright, Deborah Luster, and Pam Moxley. You can find a complete list of the photographers included in this show here.

This show is definitely worth checking out. My thanks to participant Laura Noel for passing this information along.

Lucinda Bunnen at the Museum of Contemporary Art

Lucinda Bunnen, a distinguished Southern photographer, has opened a show of her recent work at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 75 Bennett Street, in Atlanta, GA, up now through July 3rd. The images on display are from here ongoing series On Hatcher's Pond.

Bunnen, a resident of Atlanta since 1952, has been a major Southern photographer for 40 years, with work in the collections of Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Pushkin Museum in Moscow, Russia, the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. and the High Museum in Atlanta. Her work is also widely published.

More of her work can be seen here and here.