Southern Images In the Galleries -- January 2012

Some museum and gallery news of photographers young and photographers old, including 4 items of interest.

1. Kathleen Robbins and Eliot Dudik, faculty members in photography at the University of South Carolina at Columbia, along with some of their students are opening a show of photographs this weekend at Tapp's Arts Center, 1644 Main Street, in Columbia.

This show will be up through February, and you can learn more about it on Tapp's Art Center's Facebook page.

2. Duke's Center for Documentary Studies is opening a major show of color photographs taken by a variety of photographers during the Depression, up in the Juanita Krepps Gallery at CDS now through July 23rd, 2012 in their home at  1317 W. Pettigrew Street, in Durham. 

This show is called Full Color Depression, and some of the images on view were made in the South (like the one above by Jack Delano), and you can learn more about the show here and preview some of the images here.

They were shot on Kodachrome, which Kodak  took away, contrary to Paul Simon's wishes, just before Kodak itself went belly up.

3. The International Center for Photography in New York City now has up a major exhibition of work by the South African photographer Grey Villet now up through May 6th, 2012.  

The show is called The Loving Story: Photographs by Grey Villet and includes images made by Villet while he was working for Life Magazine in 1958 on assignment in Virginia documented the lives of the Lovings, an interracial couple who were married in 1958 in Washington, DC.

They settled in Virginia, but were soon arrested by Virginia authorities for violating the state's laws against interracial marriages.The Lovings eventually were vindicated by the US Supreme Court, which in 1967 declared such laws unconstitutional.

Villet shot 73 rolls of film in this assignment, but Life Magazine published only 9 of his images.The ICP now has a major show of this work on view, mostly for the first time anywhere.

4. Finally, the New York Times reports William Eggleston has decided to make digital enlargements of some of his iconic images to benefit his Foundation.

He is blowing up 36 photographs he made in the Mississippi Delta in the '70's and '80's from their original 16-by-20-inch prints and printing them in a new, oversize format at 44x60 inches. He plans to sell the entire collection at Christie's on March 12 to benefit the Eggleston Artistic Trust.

I've seen wall-sized prints made digitally from some of Walker Evans' WPA photographs and they are stunning. Eggleston's work should be equally commanding in a larger format.