Call for Entries -- The Contemporary South Show, Visual Art Exchange, Raleigh, NC

Readers of this blog may want to know that there is now a Call for Entries into a juried show called Contemporary South, to be up from January 6-26, 2012 at the Visual Art Exchange in Raleigh, NC.

The VAE is Raleigh's community-supported non-profit creativity incubator and gallery that supports and educates emerging, professional and student artists.

This show is a multimedia show, and very much open to photography.  I would love to see photographers from parts of the South outside of central North Carolina get involved with this show.

There will be awards given, with first place receiving $500, second place receiving $250, and third place receiving $100.

All entries will be judged on the basis of jpeg submissions, which may be made either online or by CD.

Artists who are members of the VAE may submit up to two images for $10 entry fee per entry. Non-members of the VAE may also submit up to two images for $15 an entry.

The deadline for all entries to arrive at the VAE is December 1st, 2011.

For full information and online submissions, go HERE on the VAE website.

Jennifer Schwartz Goes on a Crusade

Jennifer Schwartz at the Jennifer Schwartz Gallery in Atlanta is really interested in encouraging people to become art collectors, and especially collectors of photography.

To that end, she has established a program called THE TEN, with its own website. The deal is, Jennifer chooses a photographer who creates a portfolio of ten images and Jennifer offers them for $250 each.

Or, as she puts it, "The Ten is a highly curated monthly online exhibit of ten photographic images.

"The artwork you see is only available on The Ten and will never be for sale in any other location.One size, one price, one opportunity to purchase. Ever.

"Collectors are guaranteed premium, signed photographs that have true value. A new Ten collection is unveiled on the tenth of each month. The editions are relatively small (25), the price is relatively low ($250), and the collectibility is incredibly high."

Artists featured so far through THE TEN program include Lori Vrba, Mikael Kennedy, Elizabeth Fleming, Laura Griffin, and Rachel Barrett. Vrba and Griffin are Southerners, so worthy of our special attention.

OK, so that's the Story on THE TEN. But now Jennifer has decided to take the show on the road.

She is going on a crusade. She plans to get a van, paint it white, and in the spring of 2013, she will go on a ten week, ten city tour of the USA, selling her art from the back of the van and talking to people about buying original art.

To fund this, she's got a KickStarter campaign going on, and a video, also blog entries describing how the whole thing is going.

And she has talked Lori Vrba into going with her part of the way, and to donating five 8x8 signed silver gelatin prints of her image "Rebecca's Palm" to the cause as premiums for the campaign.

This is all a hoot, as we say down here, and worthy of your attention and support, if you are able.

I plan to make a pledge as I am able, and be on the lookout for a white van with Jennifer and Lori if in their travels they make it up this way. 

Museum Shows of Interest to Southern Photographers

Three items of interest:

1. The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC has opened (as of October 2nd) a major show of work by Harry Callahan called Harry Callahan at 100. The show is up through March 4th, 2012.

The show celebrates the 100th anniversary of Callahan's birth and includes over 100 photographs that document Callahan's long career, "from its genesis in Detroit in the early 1940s and its flowering in Chicago in the late 1940s and 1950s to its maturation in Providence and Atlanta from the 1960s through the 1990s."

"Throughout his long career," the National Gallery writes, Callahan "repeatedly found new ways of looking at and presenting the world in photographs that are elegant, visually daring, and highly experimental."

Harry Callahan is a Southern photographer by adoption, having spent a number of years toward the end of his life living and photographing in Atlanta, making a large body of work there, including the image "Ansley Park, Atlanta, (1992)" above.

More on the show here, from Artfixdaily.

2. The Turchin Center for the Visual Arts at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC, is having a show of work by John Scarlata called Living in the Light.

Scarlata was a nationally and internationally exhibited and collected photographer who was also a distinguished educator.From 1979 until 1999, he taught at Virginia Intermont College in Bristol, Virginia. From 1999 until his death in 2010, he served as the chair of the photography program at Appalachian State University.

Scarlata's work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including recent shows in Cuba and China.

This is a retrospective of Scarlata's work that was up last year at the Wellington Gray Gallery at East Carolina University in Greenville and is now up at the other end of North Carolina through January 21st, 2012.

There will be a panel discussion of  Scarlata's work on November 3rd, 2011 at 7:30 in the Turchin Center featuring Jay Phyfer (Professor of photography and digital imaging, Virginia Intermont College), Gil Leebrick (Professor Emeritus and former Director of the Wellington B. Gray Gallery, East Carolina University), Pac McLaurin (PhotographyDepartment, Appalachian State University) Joe Champagne (Professor of Photography & Digital Imaging Virginia Intermont College), Jackie Leebrick, Ben Garfinkle (Oakland California) and Tom Braswell (Photographer and InterimGallery Director from Wellington B. Gray Gallery, East Carolina University).

More on the panel here. 

3. The Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, SC will open a show on October 28th, 2011 called Masters in Photography, which will be up through January 8th, 2012.

The Gibbes says this show "features twentieth-century, masters of photography selected from the Gibbes permanent collection and local private collections including works by Alfred Stieglitz, Margaret Bourke-White, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Berenice Abbott, and many more."

Some Brief Notes -- Page and Dudik

Two short notes on important items of interest:

1. Susan Harbage Page's powerful work on the Texas/Mexican Border is now up at the Flanders Gallery here in Raleigh, through November 1st, 2011.

We got to the opening a couple of weeks ago and met Susan and had a great talk about her work. 

Here is a thoughtful review of the show, from the NCARTBlog, written by Matt Zigler.

2. Eliot Dudik's portfolio Road Ends in Water is featured on the website The Great Leap Sideways, along with an interview with Eliot.

The Great Leap Sideways started as a tumblr blog, here. But its now an online photography gallery, with lots of interesting images, including Eliot's. 

Panel on Alan Cohen at the Gregg Museum

A distinguished panel of photographers will discuss the work of Alan Cohen at the Gregg Museum of Art and Design, on the NC State campus, on Thursday, October 27th, 2011, at 6:00 pm.

Cohen has over 150 images up in the Gregg, in a major career retrospective for this distinguished photographer who was born in North Carolina and studied at NC State University. The show is up through December 17th, 2011.

The show is called Earth with Meaning, for Cohen in these images meditates on the contemporary world with all its scars, especially attending to places marked by history or the processes of natural events, pointing his camera downward to record the exact spots that permeate memory.

In abstracted close-ups, Cohen challenges viewers to consider the battlegrounds of World War I, the death camps of Germany, the silenced dissidents of Oaxaca, and the subtle yet significant changes reflected in the streets of Berlin before and after the Wall came down. Each of these stories is told with great simplicity and gravity through the powerful language of black and white photography.

The topic of the discussion on the 27th is Image and Meaning: Challenging History & Photography.

Panelists include a range of major figures in the world of photography.

Among them are

Brooks Jensen is co-founder, publisher and editor of the journal LensWork one of today’s most respected and important periodicals in fine art photography, and is author of the best-selling Letting Go of the Camera: Essays on Photography, and Creative Life and Single Exposures: Random Observations on Art, Photography and Creativity.

Under Jensen's leadership, LensWork Publishing has become a leader in multimedia and digital media publishing with LensWork Extended, a PDF-based, media-rich expanded version of the magazine. Jensen lives and works in Anacortes, Washington.

Mary Shannon Johnstone is Associate Professor of Art at Meredith College in Raleigh. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and MFA in photography from Rochester Institute of Technology. She is the recipient of numerous awards for her photography, including Pause, To Begin, the Critical Mass Top 50 award in both 2009 and 2010 and Honorable Mention in Lens Culture’s 2010 International Exposure Awards.

Frank Konhaus is founder and principal of KONTEK Systems, Inc. He and his wife Ellen Cassilly direct an artist residency and exhibition program at Cassilhaus, their home in Orange County. In 2006 he brought French photographer and installation artist Georges Rousse to North Carolina and became executive producer of the resulting film, Bending Space: Georges Rousse and the Durham Project. Konhaus has served on various boards and committees for the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke, is active in the Friends of Photography at the NCMA, and is a passionate collector of contemporary photography.

Tom Rankin is Director of the Center for Documentary Studies and Professor of the Practice of Art and Documentary Studies at Duke University. A native of Kentucky, his books include Sacred Space:  Photographs from the Mississippi Delta (1993 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Photography); Deaf Maggie Lee Sayre:  Photographs of a River Life; Faulkner's World:  The Photographs of Martin J. Dain; and Local Heroes Changing America: Indivisible.   

Allen Thomas, Jr. is the Business Manager of Thomas & Farris, PA, and a major collector of contemporary photography. He is the current Chair of CAM Raleigh’s Foundation Board, and a member of North Carolina Museum of Art Board of Trustees. The NCMA’s 2005 exhibition In Focus, based on photographic works Thomas had gathered, was the first show in the museum’s history created from a single collection. The 2009 inaugural exhibition at the new Taubman Museum of Art in Roanoke, VA, was Rethinking Landscape, also a solo collection show.

Burk Uzzle was born in Raleigh and just 17 when he became a staff photographer for the News & Observer. At 23 he became the youngest photographer ever hired by LIFE Magazine, and then went on to a 15 year membership in Magnum Photos, the international photographers co-operative, where he served for two years as its president before leaving in 1983. His solo museum exhibitions include the Art Institute of Chicago, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the International Center of Photography in New York. Books of his work include Landscapes, All American, Progress Report on Civilization, and A Family Named Spot.

Yours truly John N Wall, is the chair of this panel, and the usual things I say about myself are that I am a Professor of English Literature at NC State and a documentary and fine art photographer who has exhibited his work in solo and group shows across North Carolina and from Vermont to Florida and from Texas to California. I teach photography at the Raleigh Institute of Contemporary Art and write about Southern photography at www.southphotography.blogspot.com.

Come join us on the 27th!

Susan Worsham in One One Thousand

Richmond, VA-based photographer Susan Worsham is the latest photographer to be featured in OneOneThousand, the e-zine of Southern photography.

Susan offers us a portfolio named By the Grace of God, made up of images Susan says were made because they were supposed to be.

This work, she says, shows us "places, and characters, that I believe, I have found through a sort of divine intervention. They are strangers, that invite me into their homes, to sit awhile and hear their stories." 

So this work deals with "the hospitality of strangers, and hits on a feeling that I have sometimes when taking portraits. The feeling that I was supposed to meet a particular person, or turn down a certain road."

The title of this portfolio comes, of course, from the old saying, that I'm "American By Birth, Southern By The Grace Of God."  And one feels that in these images. 

One feels that the photographer is comfortable with herself and with her history as a Southerner, and with the present moment that our history has bequeathed to us and with the people we have been given as companions in this identity. 

Susan presents herself in these images as one who can write that "Kudzu is now making it's way over my childhood home, covering the past like a blanket, and putting it to rest."  So she looks "for the intimacy of 'home' in other places." 

"Following a southern road with the slow pace of a funeral march," she writes, "this series takes me beyond the backyards and trails of my youth. It deals with the hospitality of strangers" who recognize another Southerner when they see one.    

Susan looks at the South and at Southerners with clarity and integrity and clear-eyed courage.

Her work holds a sense of inevitability, that her subjects found her as much as she found them, and that the journey, and the meeting, was supposed to happen.

This is a benign form of traditional Southern fatalism, and if you are going to have that (often dubious) gift of one's Southern heritage, this is the best, and clearly the most productive, form to have it in.   

Susan's vision of the South has a gravity that imparts dignity to her subjects and her locations. This is important work, very much worth your attention.

This work also demonstrates why Susan is having a fine start to her career. In 2009, she won First Place in the Texas Photographic Society's annual International Photography Competition. In 2010, she was awarded the first TMC / Kodak Film Grant, and was also an artist in residence at Light Work in Syracuse, New York. In 2011, she was named one of PDN's 30 Emerging Photographers to Watch. 

Susan now has work in the Nine Visions show now up at the Danville Museum of Fine Arts and History in Danville, VA. 

If you can get to Danville, make sure you have a look.

ACP -- Overwhelming!

How does one take the measure of a photography festival that includes well over a hundred and fifty shows, lectures, receptions, artist's talks, and more, and more, and more?

I stumbled onto the Atlanta Celebrates Photography Festival several years ago when a professional commitment took me to Atlanta in October and I suddenly realized I was surrounded by photography. I've had work in several ACP venues over the years, but have never had the time simply to wander about and taking in the full scope of events.

So when family business took me to Atlanta last week, I jumped at the chance to take Saturday afternoon and see what I could see. But what do you do if you only have half a day to get the flavor of so vast and diverse an event?

One answer is to plan well, using the ACP Guide's listings of events by areas of Atlanta, then crank up the GPS and head out.

I specifically wanted to visit galleries where Southern photographers had work up that I had previously seen only on line. So a show called A Celebration of Photography: Six Southern Viewpoints, took me to the Art House Gallery, at 3193 Paces Ferry Place. Donna Rosser's work is there (see above), along with work by Richie Arpino, Ilia Varcev, Lila Campbell, and Diane Kirkland.

It was definitely good to see this work. I also enjoyed a long conversation with the proprietor, especially about William Eggleston, whom she knows.

My special interest in Southern photography also took me to the Emily Amy Gallery, where Stephanie Dowda has curated a show called Echoes of the Sublime, especially to see the works of Jeff Rich, who has been having an exceptionally fine year as a photographer.

Jeff's printed images -- it turns out -- are not exactly better than the same images on line, but they do have a special depth, a remarkable amount of fine detail, and a strong tactile quality when seen on the wall as a print that they don't have when seen on-screen.

Jeff shares wall space in the Emily Amy Gallery with a number of other fine photographers, including Allyson Ross of New York, John Paul Floyd of Atlanta, Klea McKenna of San Francisco, Wes Cummings of Atlanta, Justin Weaver of Atlanta, Ashley Kauschinger of Atlanta, and Megan Gorham of San Francisco.

There is a review of this show, here, from ArtsCriticATL, Atlanta's online arts journal.

The Emily Amy Gallery is in Suite 208 at 1000 Marietta Street, a funky assembly of industrial buildings that have been turned into galleries and other commercial operations, including Toscano and Sons, a first-class Italian market that has on offer delicious panini, perfect for lunch on a long day of gallery hopping.

Also at 1000 Marietta Street is the Jennifer Schwartz Gallery, which has up a couple of fine group shows, one of polaroids, featuring work by Chloe Aftel, Sol Allen, David Walter Banks, Kendrick Brinson, Amber Fouts, Grant Hamilton, Mikael Kennedy, John Reuter, and Magnus Stark. There was also a Polaroid shooter there, on Saturday, on the premises, ready to demonstrate this distinctive medium of image-making. 

The other at Jennifer Schwartz Gallery is a show of Alternative Process work, including images by Keliy Anderson-Staley, David Prifti, Joni Sternbach, S. Gayle Stevens, and Curtis Wehfritz.

Of even more interest to me was the section of the gallery with small bodies of work by Southern photographers Lori Vrba, Jennifer Shaw,  Lisette de Boisblanc, and Kathleen Robbins.

The Jennifer Schwartz Gallery shares space with an estimable publishing venture called Fall Line Press, which is pioneering new ways to get photography on paper and into people's hands.

Mentioning Fall Line Press, which features work by Laura Noel, reminds me that Laura has a show in this year's ACP up at the Spruill Gallery, at 4681 Ashford Dunwoody Road, in Atlanta, called Subject Matters.

Last year at ACP, Laura had flash shows up in various parts of Atlanta, part of what she called her Guerilla Photography Project. This year,  Laura has taken over three rooms at the Spruill Gallery. One room contains well-seem and well-thought-out images from random, or not so random, moments in life.

The next room is papered over with what must be thousands of left-over to-do lists, over the walls and the fireplace and every available surface. I immediately felt terribly behind, wondering where I was on my current list.

On the other hand, Laura has a blog for this, her "To Do Installation Project," but there are no entries in it, so I guess its OK to be behind in one's work. Unless the empty blog is itself a part of the installation. There is, by the way, a review of this show, here, on the BurnAway site.

In any case, I then happily moved into the next room, where I found a wide range of images and objects more conceptually organized and thought out.

 

The art works here range from boxes of matches (I almost took one, but restrained myself, thanks to the stern warning posted near the bowls of match boxes) to photographs of buttons and pieces of candy with images on them to works like this one, in which Laura has photographed books discarded from libraries.

Laura says of this work,  "These books . . . represent time and yet are inevitably destroyed by its passing. The librarian's 'Withdrawn' stamp is like a silent slap across the face. A once loved volume is ostracized from the family home."

I also made it to Jackson Fine Art for the exhibition of Sally Mann's recent work Proud Flesh, a body of work in which the subject is Mann's own husband, who is living with late-onset muscular dystrophy. This is powerful photography in which Mann uses the processes of image making to engage us with aging and illness and courage and loss and longing. 

Mann's images emerge from the process of their creation marked in engaging ways. There is the subject, which is the wasting body of her husband, and the composition, which shows us this body unflinchingly, and the light, which makes these images a play of light and shadow, and the chemical process, which marks this body with its own random traces of time and change. 

This is strong work, in the great tradition of religious art, in which the body is the site of meaning-making, of our efforts to come to terms with both the gift and the challenge of embodied existence.

There is a review of this show, from ArtsCriticATL, here.

I first encountered Mann's work at an earlier exhibit at Jackson Fine Art, of her Deep South portfolio. In a number of ways, her work has called me to make the American South a subject of my own work, and of this blog.  I'm grateful to Mann for that, too. 

And that pretty much covers my time at ACP. I missed a show I really wanted to see, with work of my friend Titus Heagins, as well as work by Allen Coonley, Builder Levy, and Marlene Lilian, at the Arnika Dawkins Gallery, but they were closed when I got there. If you go to the Anika Dawkins Gallery website, you can see images of the work I missed.

And there was still so much one could see and do. Folks in Atlanta -- and throughout the South -- are fortunate to have this annual extravaganza of photography. Next year, I'll plan a longer visit.

South x Southeast Photomagazine Volume II.1

The latest issue of SouthxSoutheast Photomagazine (or SXSE, as their friends call 'em), is now out, and its a milestone issue, Volume II, a sign of survival, for October, and its here.

This issue includes kudzu and small towns and pick-up trucks, and photographs by David Simonton (see above), Rob Hann, Langdon Clay, Mike Smith, and many, many more. Just what one would want from an e-zine of Southeastern photography.

You've got to subscribe to experience it all, but its a thriving operation and one truly worthy of your support.

Southern Photography at the Ogden Museum in New Orleans

The Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans has a show up now and another show opening at the end of October that are definitely of interest to Southern photographers.

The show currently up is of work by Mississippi-based photographer Briney Imes in a portfolio called Whispering Pines, a collection of black and white and color photographs taken over two decades in and around a café and bar in the Mississippi prairie.

This establishment -- and its owner and clientele -- apparently were all colorful and crusty and engaging, just the way you would want a bar to be in rural Mississippi. In this body of work, Imes documents the place and its colorful proprietor and patrons from the mid-1970s until the café closed in the early 1990s.

The show upcoming at the Ogden -- and opening October 31st -- is called Photographs from the Permanent Collection of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art.

Photographs in this show, we are told, "provide a visual narrative of the ever-changing American South – the nineteenth century, the Great Depression, the civil rights movement and the emergence of the New South" Photographers whose work is in the show include E. J. Bellocq, Walker Evans, Elliot Erwitt, William Christenberry, and, as they say, "many more." 

This show is up through January 3rd, 2012, at the Ogden Museum,at 925 Camp Street, in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Jessica Ingram in One One Thousand

The latest Southern photographer to be featured in One One Thousand is Nashville (and Oakland, California) based photographer Jessica Ingram. Not quite sure how Ingram conducts a bi coastal career, but the work is good, so let that pass.

Ingram's portfolio is called Waiting for a Sign, and its about one of those great Southern topics of perennial interest, the family, or, better, one's own family. They are also about the experience of leaving home, putting distance between oneself and one's past, and then seeing if Thomas Wolfe was right about going home.

Ingram, perhaps from the perspective of California, or from the perspective of the journey that has taken her from the South to California, goes home to Grandma, and to signs, and to the rituals of Southern white working class life in gardens and funerals and churches and pathways and trailer parks.

Ingram says of her images that they are about "the division and closeness that exists simultaneously between family members," and are part of an effort "to reconnect with family members I felt distanced from," but they turned out to be about separation as well, about "complex family relationships and attempts to understand the point at which individuals who are related and connected in so many ways eventually separate."

The title of the portfolio comes from a sign about signs, like Magritte's painting of a pipe that carries the reminder that this sign is not a pipe, except the image here is of a sign that says that, unlike Magritte's pipe it is what it is and, "If you are looking for a sign, here it is."

Here the overtone is of course religious, an echo of evangelical Christianity's word play with Jesus and signs. Although I've often wondered, if Jesus is the answer, what is the question. The folks who made the sign in Ingram's image were confident they knew what the question was, and what this sign is a sign of, but it's clear Ingram isn't quite so sure.

Images here treat people but also roads and signs, or as Ingram puts it, "I am interested in the spaces in between; roads I travel connecting me to members of the family, but also the space and relation of family members to one another. These spaces are so intimate and so familiar, yet often so hard to fit into."

So these images turn out to be about making images that help one "understand the history of my family," here  the themes extend farther than the personal narrative. There is a greater narrative about the powerful nature of religious belief, and the rifts that can result, but also the strong pull to one another that can exist in families. There is a great expectation when a family is started, or expanded, and then eventually, there is a desire, even desperation, to hold onto what is being lost."

Images of course hold on, but distance. Granma (image at the top) here looks not at the camera but to where only she is going, quickly, across the frame, a little ahead of the photographer's attention.

Ingram here draws our attention to the making of this work as well as to the subjects she chooses to frame. There is a strongly personal flavor to this work, yet I suspect it will have strong resonance for those of us who grew up in similar Christ-haunted landscapes.

One One Thousand has edited Ingram's portfolio down to 15 images from the 25 that are on her website under the fuller name If You Are Waiting For a Sign, Here It Is. There may be a conversation here between the two versions of her portfolio. In any case, this is work worthy of our attention.

Center for Documentary Studies Announces 2011 Daylight/CDS Photo Awards

Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies and Daylight Magazine partner each year to make awards for photography grounded in the documentary tradition.

This year's winners have been announced, and you can see their work up at CDS in Durham through December 22nd, at the Center for Documentary Studies,1317 W. Pettigrew Street, in Durham (directions here) and in an online story here.

There is even more of their work here.

The winner for best project is Tamas Dezsos, with Jury Picks in this category also going to Kris Vervaeke, Sebastian Liste, and John Cyr.

The winner for best Work-in-Process is David Pace, with Jury Picks in this category going to Baldomero Fernandez, James Dodd, Lydia Goldblatt, Lorenzo Martelli, and Shane Lavalette.

These folks are from all over the place (literally, with home sites ranging from NYC to Italy to Spain to Singapore), though none are actually from the American South.

The local connections, though, are several. One, that CDS is now a cultural center of sufficient renown to draw entries from all over the world to its competition.

Two, that, especially, the works of Baldomero Fernandez remind us that the rural South is now exceptionally difficult to distinguish from generic rural America.

And three, that one of the winners is Shane Lavalette, who we know is spending the year roaming our region and photographing us for the High Museum in Atlanta.

Congratulations to CDS for identifying a fine array of photographers and bringing their work to Durham.

ACP in Full Swing

The annual Atlanta Celebrates Photography Festival is now in full swing, with shows up all over Atlanta and in neighboring towns in museums and galleries and restaurants, with talks and receptions, and lectures, and the portfolio review, and more, and more, and more.

To find out what's happening, there is the on-line version of the Guide, here.

There is also a preview from BurnAway Magazine, here.

There is also ACP's own FaceBook page here, and blog, here.

There are mainly lots of splendid and challenging and engaging and disturbing photographs to see. People I know either in person or through this blog have work up, like my friend Titus Heagins (image above) who has work in a show at the Arnika Dawkins Gallery called Black & White and Color, opening October 14th with a reception from 6-8 pm.

Titus also has a new website, here, so check that out, too. 

I will be down for a look atACP in a couple of weeks, but in the meantime I will try to experience ACP vicariously through blogs and online versions of shows and first-person accounts that filter this way.

Keep 'em coming, folks.

Anderson Documents New Orleans in One One Thousand

One One Thousand is continuing its series featuring photographers coming to terms with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, this time with a portfolio of images called One Block by Little Rock, Arkansas photographer Dave Anderson.

Anderson's portfolio is the result of his photographing in a single block of the Holy Cross section of New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward repeatedly over a period of two and a half years.

Anderson says his goal with this series was to learn, post-Katrina,"to follow both the obvious physical rebuilding of the homes as well as the evolving psychological state of the residents."

His central question in his work was posed in response to a comment by a resident of the city, who said, "You just wanna be home." Anderson wondered, "Doesn't everyone? Would they ever be? Would that thing, whatever it was, that was so uniquely New Orleans return, dissipate or transform into something completely different?

"And what about the thousands of small communities that existed within the city — would they survive, or even flourish? What was lost was clear, but what could be recovered was not at all clear."

What is clear is that Anderson offers us in this portfolio a set of strong, haunting, even haunted images. The people in them seem themselves to be haunted, by what they have been through, by what has been lost, perhaps by the struggle already required to regain a small semblance of order, of balance, of a future to look forward to.

These folks have earned our honor and respect, and Anderson's work deserves our thoughtful attention.