Even More Good News for Kathleen Robbins

Columbia, SC-based photographer Kathleen Robbins continues to be celebrated for her work. Since our last report, she's been featured on NPR on the subject of cotton's role in Southern culture and the economy. She will also be a participant in a show at the Light Factory in Charlotte, NC, beginning  January 30th, 2012, and up through May 6th, 2012.

The Light Factory is Charlotte's museum of photography and film, and is at 345 North College Street in downtown Charlotte (except they call it uptown, for reasons unknown to anyone who doesn't live there).

This show, called The Calm Before the Storm, will be in the Light Factory's Knight Gallery, and will also include work by Eric Tomberlin, Camille Seaman, and Pipo Nguyen-duy.

Eric Tomberlin has some Southern connections (go here), but Camille and Pipo, though clearly fine photographers, are, as they say, Not From Around Here.

The Light Factory says this show is intended to continue an examination of our "relationship with the environment, a photographic theme that began with the influential 1975 exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape," originally held at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, but since recreated (in 2010) at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA).

"New Topographics," the Light Factory goes on, "rejected the 19th century romanticized view of the environment and focused on the intervention of industry—land transformed by human presence, directly and/or indirectly. Today, we are asking if this precarious relationship has gotten better, is currently at a standstill, or has gotten much worse?

"The Calm before The Storm includes . . . photographers who are exploring the external landscape and who understand the paradoxes inherent in the juxtapositions of man and the natural environment."

Congratulations to Kathleen and to all these photographers. I'm looking forward to the show in Charlotte.