Gallery Shows Link Past and Present in Photography

Three shows open or opening this month in Asheville, NC, New Orleans, and Columbia, SC document the relationship between past and present in photography.

Castell Gallery, in Asheville, NC, is opening tonight -- August 8th, 2014 -- an intriguing show drawing on the collections of three important collectors of photography, two of them from North Carolina. 

In addition to work from the collection of W. M. Hunt (who is Not From Around Here), the show draws on the collections of Allen Tomas of Wilson, NC, and David Raymond, of Asheville, NC. 

The show includes work by photography masters like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Harry Callahan, Imogen Cunningham, Sally Mann, Lee Friedlander, and André Kertész, but also includes work by eight emerging or mid-career contemporary photographers. 

They include Ben Alper, Tom Butler, Amy Friend, Aspen Hochhalter, Stacey Page, Charlie Rubin, Lauren Semivan, and Christine Zuercher. 

All this work will be up at the Castell Gallery in Asheville through the end of September, 2014. 

The Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans has up a show of photographs, One Place, by Paul Kwilecki, through September 21st, 2014. 

Paul Kwilecki photographed in Decatur County, Georgia from the 1960's into the 2000's. attending, in a very Southern way to his own "postage stamp of earth," documenting both the changes that time brought with it and the things that endured. 

The Ogden says of this work that it is "an intimate and focused portrait of a single place that resonates with a universal vision of humanity." 

Kwilceki worked in a style that reminds me of the documentary style of WPA shooters in the 1930's and 1940's. In his work, the subject matter changes more than the vision. But the power of this work is a reminder of the effectiveness of that style, a powerful style for one who wishes to function as a witness.

The McMaster Gallery, in the School of Visual Art and Design at the University of South Carolina, is opening on August 28th, 2014 a major show of work that explores contemporary uses of historical photographic methods.

The show is called Pathways, and demonstrates how contemporary use of early photographic processes helps photographers working today give a distinctive look and feel to their image making. 

Techniques in use in this work include tintype, palladium, gum bichromate, and collodion image making.

Artists whose work is featured in this show include Anne Berry, Diana Bloomfield (see image above), Carolyn DeMeritt,  Christine Eadie, Frank Hamrick, Aspen Hochhalter, Kevin Bruce Parent, Emma Powell, Laurie Schorr, and S. Gayle Stevens.  

Their work will be up at the McMaster Gallery through October 4th, 2014. 

Good to see these gallery shows with a sense of history, giving visual proof that in the South the past isn't dead, its not even past, even in the practice of photography.

Well worth checking out if you are in Asheville, or New Orleans, or Columbia.