Collections, Part Three -- Slow Exposures 10th Anniversary Retrospective

One of the major events on the annual Southern fine art photography calendar is the annual SlowExposures juried show and general photography festival held in and around Concord, in Pike County, Georgia in September. 

The folks who run SlowExposures describe it as "A Juried Exhibition Celebrating Photography of the Rural South," but it is in fact much, much more. In addition to the show itself, there are the satellite shows, the portfolio review, the discussions and seminars with distinguished photographers, the parties, and the black tie Ball.

The whole thing adds up to a major celebration of photography in the American South, well worthy of the notice its gotten nationally in recent years from the New York press, including CNN, Elizabeth Avedon, and the New Yorker magazine.

Here's a History of SlowExposures, especially in the early days.

Last year, 2012, was the 10th annual SlowExposures show. As people do when they realize they have been doing something, and doing it successfully, for a significant period of time, the folks at SlowExposures decided to have a retrospective of the history of their enterprise, a special show drawing together work from all of their previous shows, to be held at the Whiskey Bonding Barn.

So, there you are. Where else can you go to a major photography show in a building called the Whiskey Bonding Barn?  A building that has its own website? And in a field in rural Georgia, at that?

But what was important was what was inside, which consisted of work by a group of photographers who attend to the rural South, and with some success, photographers who had made art and found meaning in the fields and forests and small towns of the part of the South that is still most in transition from the hardscrabble world of nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the glittering postmodern worlds of internationally interconnected cities like Atlanta and Charlotte and Miami and Dallas.

The folks chosen for this show are worthy of being known to us precisely because they have worked successfully in  the part of the South where past and present and future intersect most vividly, where the conflicts and contradictions and tragedies as well as the triumphs and the joys and the celebrations are the most distinctively Southern.

And here they are, with links to their websites when I can find them.  

Roman Alokhin   

Joe Cattoni   

Gary Cerasoli   

Paul Conlan   

Amy E. Davison 

Gilbert Dean   

Eliot Dudik  

McNair Evans

Brenda Fayard   

Jan Fields 

Malgorzata Florkowska  

Raymond Grubb  

Gary Gruby  

Susan Hadorn   

John Lusk Hathaway

Greg Huber   

Vicki Hunt   

Jan Kapoor  

Jane Kerr

Diane Kirkland   

Joanna Knox  

Judy Kuniansky   

Nancy McCrary   

Laura Noel   

Donna Rosser

Anderson Scott  

John Sumner    

Yvette Tolson   

Joe Walter  

Charlotte Weber    

Bruce West  

An impressive community of folks! Here's what Mr. Bennette had to say about the event. 

Congratulations to all these folks, and especially to Nancy and Chris and all the folks who make SlowExposures possible. Everyone interested in photography and in the American South is much in your debt.