The Dog Days of 2011 -- Catching Up

Four items of interest, mostly about things happening that are based in North Carolina:

1. Chapel Hill, NC-based (and previously featured on this blog) photographer  Lori Vrba is the current featured artist for Atlanta's Jennifer Schwartz Gallery's program THE TEN, which features each month ten images by a designated photographer, all for $250 each. Vrba does compelling, engaging work, very much worth checking out.

2. The work now up at DOMA Gallery in Charlotte in a show entitled The Eyes of Carolina is now also available online HERE.

The show includes work by North Carolina-based photographers Eric Baden, Frank Konhaus (see above), Jeff Murphy, Rachel Nemecek, and Mike Smith.

This work looks very much worth seeing, and DOMA Gallery is at 1310 S Tryon Street, in Charlotte.

Call 'em at 704.333.3420 if you want to see the work, because they are apparently open now only by appointment (or so said the sign on the door this past Tuesday).

3. I've now, finally, received my copy of the annual Photography issue of Southern Cultures, the very fine quarterly published by the UNC Press for the Center for the Study of the American South. 

This issue, guest-edited by Tom Rankin of Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies, contains a number of superlative essays, including Rankin's own essay, "The Cruel Radiance of the Obvious," about photography and the American South; Ben Child's "Mapping The Democratic Forest," on the work of William Eggleston; and Dolores Flamiano's "Heroes of Hell Hole Swamp," on the photographs of South Carolina midwives made by Hansel Mieth and W. Eugene Smith.

There are also first-class photo essays by Susan Harbage Page and Michael Carlebach.

Splendid work, all around, in this issue.  And anyone who knows anything about academic institutional rivalries knows the significance of what I mean when I point out this is a joint product of Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

4. Speaking of Duke University, and their Center for Documentary Studies, CDS has announced the winners of the Daylight/CDS Photo Awards for 2011.This is a joint project of CDS and Daylight Magazine which used to be published in Chapel Hill, NC, but has, I think, now gone elsewhere.

There is more on the Daylight/CDS Photo Awards here.

This year's winners are Tamas Dezso, for his portfolio Here, Anywhere, and David Pace, for his work-in-progress Friday Night.

Well worth looking at through the award announcement is the work by the long list of Jurors' Choice and Honorable Mention selections, in addition to the work of the two winners.
There is exceptional work here, from photographers all over the world and all over the USA. The quality and diversity of the work, together with the exceptional geographic range of the photographers, bears strong witness to the importance of CDS (and of course Daylight Magazine) in the current practice of photography. You're doing good, guys. I'm proud to be an alumnus. 

I of course looked for photographers here with Southern roots and didn't find any. I did find two folks not from around here who are doing work in the South this summer, Shane Lavalette,(who as we know is right now doing a commission for the High Museum) and Stacy Kranitz, who at the moment is somewhere in the South, and plans to be working here through September of this year.

You can see some of her work made Down Here on her Ongoing Narrative Blog, which we will continue to follow with interest. Ywesterday, she posted work from Garner, Kentucky, where she checked out a full-immersion baptism and a prayer meeting.

She calls this body of work-in-progress her Appalachian Summer, and she says you can check on her progress (and see if she's working near you) by emailing her at stacy@stacykranitz.com or by calling her up at 213.447.8229.

Its amazing, the phenomenon of social media, through which we can follow folks' work in pretty much real time.