Jim Goldberg Wins Deutsche Borse Photography Prize

We have been following the progress of the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize for 2011 because one of the finalists was Southern photographer Roe Ethridge.

At the end of the day, Ethridge lost out to Jim Goldberg, another American photographer, who was presented the £30,000 award by broadcaster and critic Miranda Sawyer at a special ceremony today at Ambika P3 Gallery in London.

Ethridge did not go away empty-handed, however. He and the other two finalists -- Thomas Demand and Elad Lassry -- were awarded consolation prizes of £3,000, plus the show of the finalists they've been in in London and a huge amount of publicity for being finalists.

Interestingly, this year's show had come under fire in England because conceptual, staged photographs seemed to be the dominant practice of the finalists. Goldberg's work, however, comes out of the documentary tradition, although he uses lots of non-traditional forms of display, including videos as well as still photography.

This year's Jury for the Prize consisted of Alex Farquharson (Director, Nottingham Contemporary); Marloes Krijnen (Founding Director, Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam); Joel Sternfeld (artist, USA); and Anne-Marie Beckmann (Curator, Deutsche Börse Art Collection, Germany).

Congratulations to all, and we will wait for next year to see if photographers with Southern backgrounds continue to have a place in this competition.

Tommy Kha on OneOneThousand

Memphis-based photographer Tommy Kha is the latest photographer to be featured on OneOneThousand, the webzine about Southern photography.  He is also one of the youngest --he will receive his BFA in Photography from Memphis College of Art in a matter of weeks and will go on to further glory as a student in the MFA program at Yale.

Kha's portfolio for OneOneThousand is called What's My Line, a title taken from the old TV show about incongruities between the way one looks and the job one does. Kha is 'way too young to remember this show, but he uses its title effectively for this body of work.

The images deal with issues of cultural and intergenerational expectations and aspirations. Each image shows Kha playing the role of one or another stereotypical career path for a person with his background, some of which are cultural (working in a Chinese restaurant or open-air market) while others embody parental aspirations (doctor, teacher, businessman, musician).

All these images show Kha playing the role of someone who fulfills someone else's dreams. But all the while Kha is in fact playing the role of the photographer he, presumably, really wants to be by making these images of himself playing other roles.

Kha deals with questions of identity in much of his work, doing the Cindy Sherman thing of changing costumes to signal changes in self, as he says in his Artist's Statement, surveying "experiential topographies—a mapping of experiences—in order to confirm and undermine his interchanging identities as a Southern, Chinese America."

"Experimental topographies," that's MFA School talk, making a metaphor out of the language of geography and map making for the external appearances we use as visual cues to understanding the roles people play.

As a person of Chinese background who grew up in the American South, Kha brings to the question of Southern photography a new set of agendas, but retains a focus on some perennial concerns about personal identity and the complexities of cross-cultural awareness. Southerners are always both/and people, regardless of the angle of vision that reveals our simultaneous multiplicity of roles and histories.

Interesting the body of work that OneOneThousand chose to feature. Kha's website contains another portfolio that addresses directly the kinds of issues posed indirectly by Kha's What's My Line portfolio. Its his Meridiana -- Finding South portfolio, here, which sets out to"survey" Kha's "so-called “Southern” cultural heritage by rendering iconologies of a South."

Kha goes on, "These photographs determine to defy and redirect the timeless stereotype embedded within the American South. However, with the inclusion of photographs taken outside the Southern United States, the series looks to undermine the construction and reconstruction of the Old South and New South."

I'm not quite sure what that means, either, but clearly it has to do with exploring Southern identity, perhaps the relationship between stereotypes and individual instances, of whether stereotypes thought of by Southerners as "Southern" really are all that unique, etc. And only three of these photographs were not made in the South, the two made in Brooklyn and the one made in Shanghai (and Brooklyn is often described as the South in relationship to Manhattan, so that's a link).

In any case, Kha does good work and I hope when he gets to Yale he continues to draw on his distinctive heritage, in all its complexity, as he continues to develop his artistic career. We expect great things in his future.

David Simonton Discusses His Influences

My friend and fellow Raleighite David Simonton has an exceptionally thoughtful piece on his major photographic influences, published on the oneonethousand blog. 

David is very forthright in this essay, noting, with examples, the work of Harry Callahan (who ended his career with work in Atlanta), Peter Simon, Sylvia Plachy, Paul Caponigro, and Joel Meyerowitz, and especially their sense of light and place.

One nice this about David's essay is that it has numerous examples fron each of his photographic influences, concluding with some of David's own work. One can watch, as one works through this piece, the development of David's personal transformation of all these influences into his own style and sense of vision.

You can find more of David's work on his website, here.

Major Photography Shows In But Not Of The South, Part Two

The High Museum of Art in Atlanta is hosting a major retrospective exhibition of work by Henri Cartier-Bresson, now up through May 29, 2011. There is much to learn about Cartier-Bresson from the High's website even if you can't make it to Atlanta before the end of May.

There are reviews of this show here from ArtsCriticATL.com  and here from Creative Loafing, Atlanta's weekly guide to cultural life in the Big Southern City. 

Southern Photojournalist Chris Hondros Dies in Libya

Southern photojournalist Chris Hondros died on Wednesday, April 20th, 2011, as a result of injuries sustained in a rocket grenade attack in the besieged Libyan city of  Misurata, alongside two other photographers who were seriously injured.

Tim Hetherington, the director and producer of the film “Restrepo,” was with the photographers and was also killed in the attack.

The two other photographers -  Michael Brown of the Corbis Agency and Guy Martin of Panos Pictures -- were treated for shrapnel wounds, and were reported to be recovering.

Hondros, who was a photographer for Getty Images, suffered a severe brain injury and died at a medical center located near the front lines.

He was working at his craft until the end of his life, producing images of the conflict in Libya earlier on Wednesday, including the one above of Libyan insurgents planning their next move in their battle with the current Libyan government.

Hondros grew up in North Carolina and was an alumnus of NC State University in Raleigh. He had a long career working in some of the most dangerous places in the world, including Sierra Leone, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kosovo, as well as Libya.

He won many awards, including the Robert Capa Gold Medal in 2005, and has received fellowships from the Pew Foundation and the USAID.

There is a tribute to Chris on the Gerry Images blog. A tribute to Chris is here, on the NY Times website. A portfolio of his work in Libya is also here, on the NY Times website. NC State University's News Service has a story here, with a slide show of a selection of Chris's work. A tribute from his friend Tucker Reed is here. A tribute from the Los Angeles Times is here.

A personal note -- I met Chris several years ago when he spoke to a class in photojournalism and documentary photography I taught with our University Photographer Roger Winstead. Chris held our students spellbound with his powerful images and his generous discussion of his working methods.

Chris had mastered the art of working effectively in the most dangerous and difficult of circumstances, yet he communicated a calm acceptance of the danger as a necessary part of practicing his craft. He believed deeply in the importance of his work, the need to document the conditions and experiences of war and to make local and immediate the humanity of those caught in the midst of war. 

The Gregg Museum of Art and Design at NC State University hosted a solo exhibition  of his work in 2005.  Images from that show will be on display in Chris' memory at the Gregg for the next several days.

Help the Photo Book Club Find Book Stores in the South

We're joining with One One Thousand to appeal to Southern photographers to help The Photo Book Club identify books stores with strong collections of photography books.

The Photo Book Club has set out to make a map of good book stores for photography books.

The folks at One One Thousand note that they have no book stores in the Southeast on their map.

I'm sending the Photo Book Club the names of the Regulator Bookshop and the Gothic Bookshop in Durham, Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh, and the Bulls Head Book Shop in Chapel Hill, as well as the bookstores in the NC Museum of Art and the Nasher Museum.

I bet there are fine stores in other parts of the South. Lets let them hear from us.

The way to make recommendations is via  social media.

email: mail@photobookclub.org

twitter: @photobookclub

hashtag: #photobc

Tell them the name and address of the store and give some comments on their holdings.

Jan Banning Photographs in the South

The Atlanta Celebrates Photography blog brings word that well-known Dutch photographer Jan Banning is engaged in a long-term project photographing homeless people in the South.

Banning began this project while Artist-in-Residence in September and October of 2010 at the  701 Center for Contemporary Art in Columbia, SC. He has since expanded the scope of his practice, beginning to make portraits of homeless people in Atlanta and, Banning says, "possibly, the Mississippi Delta: a big city and a small-town “habitat,” next to the medium-sized city of Columbia."

You can find a small sample of Banning's portraits, as well as more information on this project here. 

Banning is best known for his portfolio Bureaucratics,  a series of environmental portraits of bureaucrats in their offices. His work, both in Bureaucratics and in these Southern portraits, witness to the continuing power the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher and their typological school has among contemporary fine art photographers.

Banning says his goal in this project is to portray "these people not as what they are: homeless, with all visual references of destitution that society associates with that such as bagpacks, shopping carts, tents and sleeping bags, etc., but by focusing on who they are."  His hope is that his work "will contribute to a better understanding of the fate of the homeless."

Once complete in 2011, this work will be published and exhibited in Columbia. It promises to be a compelling show.

The Eyes of Texas at Do Not Bend Gallery in Dallas

Four distinguished photographers based in Texas are featured in a major show of their work, called The Eyes of Texas, at the Photographs Do Not Bend Gallery in Dallas, Texas at1202 Dragon Street. The show also celebrates the 16th anniversary of the opening of the PDNB Gallery in Dallas.

Featured photographers include Peter Brown, Keith Carter, Earlie Hudnall Jr.(image above),  and George Krause, all of whom have had long and distinguished careers as photographers in Texas and elsewhere.

Images from this show are here.  The show opened this past weekend and is up at PDNB Gallery through July 2nd of this year.

When thinking about the South, Texas is an enigma among enigmas, a state large enough and perhaps culturally distinctive enough to be its own country, a state that often is more a part of our narrative of the West, of cows and cowboys, yet is also historically a part of the legacy of Southern history and culture.

When I set up this blog on Southern photography, I almost decided to limit it to the East-of-the-Mississippi South, but decided to include Texas in part because of the fine work of the Texas Photographic Society but also because Texas was part of the old Confederacy, and that history is hard to neglect.

When I look at the images in this show at the PDNB Gallery, I'm reminded of this question.

Earlie Hudnall's work could have been made just as easily in Atlanta or Memphis or Columbia or Charlotte or Durham or Richmond. Keith Carter and George Krause find images in Texas and all over the world that capture their romantic engagement with their subject matter. Peter Brown's images of churches and run-down buildings.in this show could have been made in lots of places in the eastern South, yet much of his work is made in the deserts and open vistas of the Big Sky West.

Lets just say this work helps us define the enigma of Texas rather than resolve it.

UPDATE -- Michael Sebastian's Career is Taking Off

New Orleans-born and Louisville, Kentucky-based photographer Michael Sebastian puts people to sleep for a living but his photography arrests our attention with his rich use of color and his exceptional eye for composition in his meditations on the Southern suburban landscape.

Sebastian is a Southern photographer we are just getting to know, but others have noticed.  He's just started a regular column on the fraction blog, here.

In 2010 alone, he was a featured photographer on One One Thousand, selected as a Critical Mass Finalist, featured on Flak Photo, chosen as a participant in the highly competitive Review Santa Fe portfolio reviews, featured in the Griffin Museum Virtual Gallery, and published in the The New York Times Magazine.

Congratulations to Michael on his work and on his well-deserved recognition. We look forward to seeing more of his work.

Updates -- Interviews with Roe Ethridge and Mark Steinmetz

One of the good things about the WWW is the amount of interesting material one runs across, including especially interviews with artists.

There is, for example, a really interesting interview with Mark Steinmetz here, on American Suburb X, and with Roe Ethridge on the website of The Photographers' Gallery, here.

The interview with Roe Ethridge is interesting because it is an oral interview rather than a text interview; one learns from it a good deal about how he thinks about his work, including the relationship between his commercial work (note the LL Bean catalogue cover) and his Fine Art work.

One also notes that Roe, who grew up in Atlanta, has been out in the world long enough to lose his Southern accent.

Sally Mann on PBS: Art-21

There is a fascinating, though overly brief, documentary on Sally Mann available on PBS at the moment. Its part of their ART:21 series that deals with a range of artists who are offered by PBS as representing American art in the 21st century.

This episode is on the subject of PLACE.  If you click on the above link, you can watch the entire episode, which also includes segments devoted to Richard Serra and some other folks. Mann's is the second segment and it starts about 14 minutes into the episode.

This ART: 21 episode includes conversation with Mann, and with her husband and some of her children. There is discussion of Mann's cameras, methods, artistic concerns, and the like. There is also discussion of her artistic concerns, especially their Southern roots in landscape, family, history, and opportunity.

PBS also has a web page for Mann, here, that includes more information, more filmed material, more links. 

What with her show in Richmond, VA, her involvement in this project for PBS, and her upcoming talks at Harvard, Mann is having a major year in her professional life. This is good to see. and to enjoy, and to celebrate.

Review of Laura Noel's Cattywonkus Work

Laura Noel's work now on display at the Hagedorn Gallery in Atlanta gets an appreciative and insightful review by Catherien Fox on the ArtscriticATL.com website.

Catherine Fox likes Noel's cattywonkus view of the world. Now, that's a Southern word for you, except we spelled it "cattywompus" in my part of the South when I was a boy.

In any case, the review is laudatory, the work itself is first-class, and its all worth checking in on, if you are in Atlanta.  

Roe Ethridge in Deutsche Borse Prize Show in London

Southern photographer Roe Ethridge is one of four finalists for the annual Deutsche Borse Prize, given annually by The Photographers Gallery in London. Along with Ethridge, the other finalists are Thomas Demand, Jim Goldberg, and Elad Lassry.

The Gallery has a show of all four photographers' work up now through May 1st, 2011, at Ambika P3 at the University of Westminster, in London. The Gallery's website has lots of good information about the Prize and about the photographers, as well as links to video interviews with each photographer.
 
The Deutsche Borse Prize is worth about $50, 000, a good chunk of change, which is awarded to "a living photographer, of any nationality, who has made the most significant contribution, in exhibition or publication format, to the medium of photography in Europe over the previous year."

The winner will be announced toward the end of April. We will keep you posted.

For now, its interesting that the show has kicked up a bit of controversy in London. Sean O'Hagan, who writes about photography for the Guardian newspaper,  reports that Magnum photographer Chris Steele-Perkins has castigated the gallery for its "very, very narrow definition of photography" and its "often mediocre representation of that practice".

O'Hagan continues, "In a follow-up statement, Steele-Perkins wrote: "I am angry that Photographers' Gallery has become a misnomer. It is not about photography or photographers, it is about a narrow thread of photographic curation that is frequently dull, and/or poorly conceived."

O'Hagan notes that other British photographers have joined with Steele-Perkings in criticizing the Gallery for its narrow focus. O'Hagan notes that the fuss is about the fact that the work of all four of the short-listed Prize photographers practice conceptual photography, which he feels is "a genre guaranteed to raise the hackles of the public – and the many photographers who value practice over theory – as much as it generates reams of theoretical jargon by its critical champions."

O'Hagan's further thoughts on conceptual photography are here. In his view, conceptual photography is photography that sets out to "interrogate the photographic medium." The controversy has gotten the attention of Joerg Colberg over on the Conscencious blog, who says that a Prize is a Prize and not worth arguing about, although he admits he is "not the biggest fan of conceptual photography, because for me, it’s usually too obvious."

We had some discussion about conceptual photography on this blog last week, about the work of Maury Gortemiller. O'Hagan's definition of conceptual photography is way off, in my view. Photography can always be said to engage in the interrogation of the photographic medium, given that photography as a new medium of artistic expression is always discovering afresh what it can do. As, mostly,  a modern art form, it is part of modern art's inherent questioning and reinvention of the medium of its practice.

To me, the practice of conceptual photography is about deciding in advance the issues (concepts?) one wants to address in a photograph, as opposed to the documentary or photojournalistic tradition, in which one goes out with a camera to see what the world has to offer.

I think conceptual photography is a major discipline of photography taught in many MFA programs today, and as I said in the earlier conversations the issue for me is not conceptual photography so much as it is the way some practitioners of conceptual photography cloud their work in a jargon that obscures their photographic achievement, restricting the audience for their work to those who can penetrate the language of their Artist's Statements.

We will keep up with this controversy in England and report on any new developments.

Conversation on Gender in Photography at Hagedorn Foundation Gallery

Laura Noel, Stephanie Dowda, and others will join a panel of critics and curators including Rebecca Dimling Cochran, curator of The Wieland Collection; Lisa Kurzner, independent scholar and photography expert; and Michael David Murphy, ACP Program Manager and critic, to ask the question, "Is There a Gender Voice?"

The conversation takes place tonight, April 7th, 2011.

The panel, moderated by Hagedorn director Brenda Massie, is to explore the idea of voice in relationship to work by female photographers in this show as well as in "Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography," currently on display at MoMA.

Since all of the photographers in the Hagedorn Foundation Gallery show, save one, are Southern, and since the idea of the Southern woman is important in Southern cultural history, I hope the question of whether there is a Southern female photographer will come up.

Interesting that the conversation is framed in terms of a "gender voice," a concept I am more familiar with in literary circles. I'm surprised the conversation is not framed in terms of a gendered vision or perspective, terms more congenial, one would have thought, to a conversation wkith photographers.

I would love to be at this event. I hope someone who reads this blog and who goes to the discussion will make a full report.

Space on this blog will be provided.

Matt Eich in the Mississippi Delta on YouTube

We haven't tried videos on Southern Photography before, but this is a meditation on work done by  Matt Eich  in Baptist Town in the Mississippi Delta.

Matt is one of the Southern Photographers We Watch Out For. He says of this work that it is part of an ongoing project "about the dichotomy of light and dark, sin and salvation in the Deep American South. On a deeper level it is about the inheritance of slavery and how it continues to impact generations of people growing up in America."

That, and Matt's skill in making images that are arresting and compelling, makes this experiment worth trying.

Matt is part of the LUCEO group of photographers you can follow on their website here or their FaceBook page, here. 

Matt will also have work from this and other portfolios in a variety of venues in the coming months.

Look for Matt's work at The Bridge PAI, in Charlottesville, VA for “Altered States” LUCEO group exhibition, curated by Brian Paul Clamp up from June 2 – June 30, also at the  New York Photo Festival, New York, NY, for a show called “Hope” curated by Enrico Bossan, from May 11 -May 15.

He will also be at the Center for Fine Art Photography, Fort Collins, CO for a show entitled “Center Forward,” curated by Hamidah Glasgow – May 6 – June 11. Finally, at the Contemporary Arts Center of Virginia, Virginia Beach, VA, for a show entitled ”Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes“, curated by Heather Hakimzidah, up from March 24 – June 26.

Strong work here, Matt. Keep us posted

Maury Gortemiller in One One Thousand

Atlanta-based photographer Maury Gortemiller is the latest Southern photographer to be featured on One One Thousand, the webzine of Southern photography.  Maury has on offer a portfolio of color prints under the rubric All Time Lotion, some of which are on the One One Thousand website and more of which are to be found here, on his website.

Maury has his MFA from the University of Georgia, another sign that Georgia's MFA photography program is one of the major ones in the South.

I must admit I had to think about this work for a while before I got the hang of it. Some of Maury's images seem at first glance to be under-imagined or under-thought, or just odd or even off-putting, at least to me.

I'm not sure that I see immediately, for example, why I'm interested in a list of colors that one might paint a muscle car. Or, for that matter, a picture of a list of colors that someone presumably once considered painting a muscle car. Especially when (though one can't tell from the presentation of this material on One One Thousand) its likely, if the presentation of this image follows the current practice, that this image would be printed at at least 2x3 feet, or larger.

So I read his Artist's Statement, which told me that he hopes in these images "to investigate fully Robert Storr's notion of the estrangement of the photograph, the medium's capability to depict persons and objects in such a way that transforms context and intention." Then I considered that maybe I wasn't getting it because I haven't been to MFA School and learned to look or shoot or think this way. 

See, OK, we've got insider knowledge here (who's Robert Storr and why is he having notions?), we've got "the medium" (OK, presumably photography) doing estrangement or other stuff to people and objects (are the people referred to here the photographer, the people in the image, or the people looking at the image?) "in such a way that transforms context and intention."

Is that the context in the frame, or the context of the photographer making the image, or the photographer choosing this image among many, or the photographer talking about the image in this discourse? Or any of the many many contexts in which the image might be seen, or seen by all the possible viewers? And, whose intention? the shooter, the posers in the image who have some say in how they present themselves, or the intention of the people who bring this work to us, whether its a gallery or the folks at One One Thousand, who make it possible for us to view, and to experience, and to construe, and to construct meaning from this work?

But then I saw this image and I knew where I was.

The brocade upholstered furniture and the pink-and-green print skirt and the talking hands -- that made sense. My aunt used to wear a dress just like that, and she had a chair upholstered in a very similar fabric, though it was green instead of gold, and she and her friends liked to talk with their hands when they wore dresses like this one and gathered in rooms like this with brocade chair upholstery. 

So, in other words, I found an image for which I had a context and I was able to make a connection and appreciate the experience of this way of seeing into such a context. But I've never had a muscle car, nor have I ever wanted to paint one. Well, I did own a '67 Camaro once, but I ordered it in navy blue and I was always happy with that color.

So, with the beginning of a (very personal) context in place, I go back to this work, and the more I looked at each image, the more engaged I got, but for different reasons, each time. For example, this image really engages me because I wonder how the light beam got split into so many different beams, going off at different angles.

Or this one, which is a damn fine photograph, regardless of anything else, because I find it intriguing and engaging and I'm arrested in my looking to look deeper and notice new stuff and to wonder new things about what it might (or might not) be about.

So the more I looked, the more engaged I became and (who knows) maybe my context and intention were estranged or transformed in the process. It may even be that when I've looked some more I'll appreciate the photo of the list of colors. There is, at least, a sub-group of these images that is about cars, and perhaps they will all work together for me, with time.

But the photograph of the hind quarters of the dog who looks like he's having an exceptionally bad day is still Too Much Information for me.

Check this work out and let me know what you think.

PS. I think if I am going to comment on Artist's Statements, I ought to open mine for comment as well. If you go here, you will find that I won First Prize in a juried show at ArtSceneToday.com, and you can see some of my work and an Artist's Statement about the work, and you can write me to say what you make of it.

PPS. Turns out that Robert Storr is the Dean of the Yale School of Art (silly me for not knowing!), and I found a really interesting interview with him on line in which he says, among other things, that "the process of making art is fundamentally different from the process of writing theory." And here's something else he said in the interview that I think is really helpful:

"It’s always nice to be a coming attraction, but it’s murder to be a has-been. If it hasn’t happened for you yet, you can at least console yourself with the idea that it might. It’s a fashionable world and even good artists go out of fashion. If you’ve never really thought about what you’re going to do when you go out of fashion because you’ve never been out of fashion, it’s much harder to take than if you’ve gradually come into your own, gotten through difficult times and know that you can survive."

PPPS. This work raises another question, which is, is the experience of a portfolio an experience of a group of images in a certain arrangement or order, or is a photograph first an image on its own, and only then a part of a larger group? In other words, should every image in a portfolio be able to stand alone, on its own terms, or is it OK when assembling a portfolio to include images that are weak on their own, but which set up interesting conversations when surrounded by the other images in the portfolio?

Major Photography Shows In But Not Of The South, Part One

The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC has up a major photography show right now of work by California photographer Lewis Baltz, called Prototypes/Ronde de Nuit (Night Watch).

The Prototypes part consists of images from Baltz' portfolio made from 1967 through the early 1970s that shows images of the sides of warehouse sheds, stucco walls, empty billboards, and other geometric forms found in the postwar suburban landscape.

According to the National Gallery website, this work deals with "the fascinating and disturbing transformation of the American landscape into an unending terrain of anonymous commercial architecture."

The Ronde de Nuit part consists of work made from 1991-1992, a 12-panel depiction of surveillance sites and the people who work in them made with surveillance cameras. The title echoes Rembrandt's Night Watch, and, again according to the National Gallery, "reveals the artist's continuing preoccupation with industrially manufactured environments and how they are used to control contemporary society."
 
This show was put together by the Art Institute of Chicago and had gotten rave reviews. It opened at the National Gallery on March 30th, 2011 and is up through July 31.

Actually, anyone who photographs '57 Chevys may have a bit of Southern in him. And if you don't think Washington, DC is in the American South, you've never been there in August.