Autumn is Coming -- Fall Festivals of Photography in the South, Part One

The South may be the summer land, where the sun doth shine, but its late August, and autumn is coming. And with autumn comes the series of photography festivals that have begun to shape the practice and display of photography in the American South.

Early September brings the second Inspired by the Lens photography festival in central North Carolina's Research Triangle (Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill).

This year's installment will include exhibits, talks, and workshops at all the good places -- the NC Museum of Art, the Nasher Museum and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University,  the Flanders Gallery in Raleigh, the FRANK Gallery in Chapel Hill, and other venues, as they say, too numerous to mention.

You can see the full program of events, here.

Late September brings Slow Exposures to Pike County, Georgia, opening this year on September 20th and running through September 29th.

The folks juried into the main show have been announced, and you can see who is in the show, here.

This show is only a part of all the components of the full Slow Exposures festival of photography in the rural South, and you can learn about all of the components of Slow Exposures, here.

And that's only the beginning. Stay tuned . . . . . 

Southern Photographers in the News and in the Galleries -- Updated

 
Raleigh-based photographer David Simonton has work from his portfolio Of This Place now featured on the blog  La Journal de la Photographie.

Chapel Hill-based photographer elin o'Hara slavick has published a book of images from her portfolio After Hiroshima, from Daylight Books. These images are cyanotypes of artifacts from the ruins of Hiroshima, collected after the nuclear bombing of the city.

Slavick’s images will also be featured in a show entitled Until What Has Disappeared Appears, up at the Stephen Cohen Gallery, in Los Angeles, CA,  opening September 19th and up through November 2nd, 2013.

Atlanta-based photographer Jane Robbins Kerr has work from her portfolio American South Red and Blue, is currently on view in the Gammill Gallery in Barnard Observatory on the campus of the University of Mississippi.

The Center for the Study of Southern Culture at Old Miss now has an interview with Kerr in the latest issue of their newsletter The Southern Register.

The Southeast Museum of Photography, in Daytona Beach, Florida, has up now an exhibition of work from Critical Mass 2012, including work by a number of Southern photographers. Among them is Columbia, SC-based photographer Kathleen Robbins.

This show is up through October 6th, 2013.

The PDNB Gallery in Dallas will have a show entitled WILLIAM EGGLESTON: His Circle and Beyond, including work by John Baldesarri, Peter Brown, William Christenberry, David Graham, William Greiner, Birney Imes, Bill Owens, Stephen Shore, Neal Slavin, and Alec Soth, as well as Eggleston, opening September 7th and up through November 9th, 2013.

And, finally, to bring photography, galleries, and publications together, Jennifer Schwartz, of Jennifer Schwartz Gallery in Atlanta, has had her project Crusade for Art featured in Photo District News, here.

Walker Evans Photographs the South

 
Walker Evans' photographs of the American South are icons of American photography and defining images for the depiction of the South in photography.

We've noted before the current show at MOMA that in part recreates Evans' landmark American Photographs show at MOMA in 1938.

Now, there is a really interesting discussion of Evans' work -- and this show -- on the New York Times LENS blog, here.

Well worth your look.  

Leah Sobsey on the Durham Bulls

Chapel Hill-based photographer Leah Sobsey, and a whole bunch of writers and other folks, have spent the summer reflecting on the phenomenon of minor league baseball, and specifically on the phenomenon of minor league baseball as played in Durham, NC, by the Durham Bulls.

Leah has been helped by another fine photographer from North Carolina, Tim Telkamp. They have come up with some of the most distinctive sports photography one is likely to see this summer, or any other summer, for that matter. 

Their work -- photographs and essays -- have been appearing in the Paris Review, and you can see their work, here, in a long series of articles under the general title Bull City Summer.

 Some of you will remember the Durham Bulls as the subject of the movie Bull Durham, widely hailed as the best baseball movie ever. That movie came out back in 1988 and gave Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, Kevin Costner, and the Durham Bulls major boosts to their careers.
  
The Durham Bulls now play in a nifty new ball park, and are a Triple-A team, no longer the Single-A team of the movie, but baseball is still baseball, an iconic activity in American culture, always worth contemplating in its forms and movements and characters and settings.

 
Here, at the end of summer in 2013, check this out. 

Nowhere else, for example, will you find tintypes of baseball team mascots or a discussion of how William Eggleston would have photographed a baseball game.

Southern Photography at the Ogden Museum in New Orleans

There are a couple of important shows for Southern photography up now at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans.

One of these shows gives us a historic overview of Southern photography; the other brings together work by, as they say, "Rising Stars" in the field. Both shows are on view through January 5th, 2014.

The first of these shows draws on the Ogden's own holdings, already one of the most comprehensive collections of Southern photography in the nation.

The  title of this show is Into the Light: Photographs from the Permanent Collection of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. The show includes photographs by Shelby Lee Adams, William Christenberry, George Dureau, William Eggleston, Birney Imes (see image above), Roland L. Freeman, Marion Post Wolcott, and, as they say, many others.

The other show, with the title Seeing Beyond the Ordinary, includes work by Atlanta-based photographer Laura Noel, from her Smoke Break portfolio (see image above), work by Tennessee-based photographer Joshua Dudley Greer, from his  Somewhere Along The Line portfolio (see image below), and work by Richmond, Virginia-based photographer Susan Worsham, from her By the Grace of God  portfolio (see image below Greer's image).

The Ogden groups Noel, Greer, and Worsham together because in the eyes of the Ogden's curators, these folks photograph the obvious, yet, as the Ogden says, "It is the obvious – the simple and everyday – that have produced some of photography’s finest images."

The Ogden goes on: "Photographers are always battling with the obvious. They are in a constant struggle to see beyond the obvious to form and create a new personal vision.

"These photographers confront the ordinary and make extraordinary photographs from everyday moments that are often overlooked or taken for granted.

"Their photographs are meditations on the present, and what seems to be lurking under the surface. The mundane and banal are revealed with a quiet intensity, giving the viewer a new appreciation of life’s rich pageant."

There you have it, in the words of the folks at the Ogden. Great to see Noel, Greer, and Worsham getting this richly deserved exposure at a museum that is doing an outstanding job of presenting Southern photography to us.

Greene, Bey, Karen, Sole -- Honorary Southern Photographers in the News

Photographers who are Not From Around Here but who address in their work issues and concerns central to the Southern experience should in my view be regarded as Honorary Southern Photographers.

Some of these folks have important projects going at the moment.

Honorary Southern Photographer Myra Greene now has work from her portfolio My White Friends (see image above) in a show entitled About Face: Contemporary Portraiture , now up at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri,  through January 19, 2014.

Greene will also have work in a show entitled Construction at the Averill and Bernard Leviton A+D Gallery, Chicago, IL August 15 - September 18, 2013. 

She is also included in the show Framed: Identity and the Photographic Portrait at the Photographic Resource Center at Boston University, in Boston, opening September 3and up through October 12, 2013, and in Histories/ Photographies DePaul Museum of Art in Chicago, opening October 11th and up through December 8, 2013.

 

Dawoud Bey (see image above) also has work in the Construction show at the Averill and Bernard Leviton A+D Gallery, along with Myra Greene.

Bey also has work from his portfolio The Birmingham Project up at the Birmingham Museum of Art in Birmingham, Alabaman, opening September 8th and up through December 2, 2013, and at the Rena Bransten Gallery, 77 Geary Street, in San Francisco, opening  September 5 - October 19, 2013.

 

Andrew Karen (see image above) has work from his portfolio White Pride is the subject of a feature story now up on the news blog Slate, here. 

Magdalena Solé (see image above) will have work from her Mississippi Delta portfolio up at the Southeast Museum of Photography, 1200 W. International Speedway Blvd, in  Daytona Beach, FL, opening September 13th and up through December 15, 2013.

Congratulations to all, and thank you for helping us Southerners take stock of and come to understand our part of the world.

Job Opening at Jimmy Williams Productions

Raleigh-based photographer Jimmy Williams is looking for a Studio Manager.

This will be a splendid opportunity for someone who wants to learn about the professional and creative practice of photography with an exceptionally talented and creative and successful photographer and a gracious human being.

Williams says he needs someone with "a strong creative and photographic background primarily to manage the daily administrative and creative operations of the studio and assist in the production of photo shoots including pre and post production, retouching, printing, framing.

"This position is primarily an administrative position, but has the opportunity to expand to a creative position as well. Preferred candidates will possess a strong administrative background with some creative experience."

 The full job description and instructions about applying are available online, here.

Or you could contact Catherine Schramm at 3801 Beryl Rd Raleigh NC 27607, or at catherine@jwproductions.com, or at 919.832.5971 or at 919.880.1210.