Photography Festivals -- Late Fall 2014

The Photography Festivals in Atlanta and North Carolina's Research Triangle are winding down, but the fall festival season continues.

Next up is FotoWeekDC, in our nation's capital, running November 8th to the 16th, with a rich array of activities, including shows, lectures, contests, and, especially, since its DC, parties and social events. 

For a full list, go HERE.

December brings PhotoNOLA, scheduled for December 4th to 7th, in New Orleans. 

PhotoNOLA seems to cram more major events into a single week than some festivals do in a much longer run. 

This year's PhotoNOLA will include a major address by Distinguished Southern Photographer Emmet Gowin, as well as a vast array of exhibitions, educational events, and the Portfolio Review, which has become a multi-day event with prizes and awards. 

For a full schedule, go HERE.

So many festivals, so much to see, so much to do, so little time! 

Sigh . . . . .

Carrie Mae Weems in London, and Elsewhere

Honorary Southern Photographer Carrie Mae Weems is having a show of her work in London at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, now up through November 15th, 2014. 

The show offers Weems' work from her Color: Real and Imagined portfolio  Images in the show are here.

There is a nice profile of Weems in the Guardian Newspaper, here.  

In other news, Weems recently closed a show of her work at the Guggenheim Museum in NYC with a 3-day gala on April 25–27, 2014, entitled Carrie Mae Weems LIVE: Past Tense/Future Perfect. 

The Guggenheim describes Weems' work, thus:

"Carrie Mae Weems is a socially motivated artist whose works invite contemplation of race, gender, and class. Increasingly, she has broadened her view to include global struggles for equality and justice. 

"The exhibition traces the evolution of Weems’s career over the last 30 years, from her early documentary and autobiographical photographic series to the more conceptual and philosophically complex works that have placed her at the forefront of contemporary art. 

"All of her work displays an overarching commitment to better understanding the present by closely examining history and identity. 

"It also contains a desire for universality: while African Americans are typically her primary subjects, Weems wants “people of color to stand for the human multitudes” and for her art to resonate with all audiences." 

"An overarching commitment to better understanding the present by closely examining history and identity" -- that's a pretty good description of what makes a Southern photographer Southern.  

It's been quite a year for Weems, not to mention the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.  

Dennis Church is having an Amazing 2014, and Its Only October

Bonita Springs, Florida-based photographer Dennis Church is having an exceptional 2014, and its only October. 

In late October, brilliantly-colored and meticulously composed images from his AMERICOLOR portfolio were featured on Jeff Rich's Eyes on the South blog for late October.

His book of these images, also called AMERICOLOR, has just been published through BLURB, and is available here.

Church has also had work featured in a number of overseas venues, including 

1. Wonderzine, a magazine based in Moscow, Russia

2. Image in Progress, an Italian photography magazine

3. ARTPHOTO Magazine, Prague, Czech Republic

In September of 2014, he had a solo show of his work at the Kaori Gallery in Canberra, Australia, up from September 4th - 27th, 2014. 

And, among other achievements, late last year, LensCulture listed Church's AMERICOLOR portfolio as one of their favorite 13 portfolios from all of 2013.

I had the good fortune to see Church's work at the recent ACP Portfolio Review. I found his images stunning, a riot of color, yet meticulously composed.

Church told me that many of his images were made from his car while sitting at stop lights, the composition of a moment. 

That's breathtaking. Everything is in the right place, lined up perfectly.  Church's ability to bring the light, color, and chaos of the Southern landscape into remarkable order is simply stunning.

All this work in all these diverse and far-flung places suggests that his work has wide appeal, bringing him well-deserved recognition as a fine art photographer.

And who knows what the rest of the year will bring.

 

Maude Clay Proclaimed Visual Artist of the Year in Mississippi

Congratulations to Maude Schuyler Clay, Sumner, Mississippi-based photographer, who has been named recipient of the Governor's Award for Excellence in the Visual Arts for the State of Mississippi for 2014.

Clay's citation from the Mississippi Arts Commission reads,

"Maude Schuyler Clay was born in Greenwood, Mississippi.  A self-described lifer of Tallahatchie County (six generations), she attended the University of Mississippi and Memphis Academy of the Arts.  

"She began her career assisting her cousin, the celebrated photographer, William Eggleston.  

"While living in New Your City, Clay worked with the LIGHT Gallery and later as a photography editor and photographer for Esquire, Fortune, Vanity Fair and a number of other publications.  

 

"Over several decades, she has made her native Mississippi the prime focus of her work, and her vision of this land, particularly the storied Delta, is the image many conjure when they think of Mississippi.

"In 1993, she turned her focus to a series of black and white photographs, that for her captured the complexities of the Delta landscape.  For this work, she preferred to “take photographs in the natural low light of early morning or late afternoon.” 

"The resulting culmination of her black and white series, the book Delta Land, was published in 1999 and earned her a Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters award for photography in 2000.

"Her current collection is Delta Dogs, inspired by her love for dogs and their unique place in the landscape of the Delta."

Congratulations to Clay for this well-deserved recognition of her achievement as an artist and for her contribution to the cultural life of Mississippi.

Lenscratch Celebrates Slow Exposures

The Lenscratch Photography Blog is celebrating the SlowExposures Photography Festival this week, bringing some exceptionally-well deserved love to Chris Curry and all the good folks in Pike County, Georgia, who make Slow Exposures a joyous event every year.

Chapter One of this series is here, from October 20th, and features a report by Aline Smithson, one of this year's jurors, on her experience with SlowExposures this year. 

Chapter Two, for October 21st, gives us the statements about this year's show by jurors Smithson and her co-conspirator in the jury room, Alexa Dilworth, as well as a generous selection of images from the main show at SlowExposures and a list of the overall winners as well as all those juried into the show. 

Chapter Three profiles MacNair Evans and his solo show, Confessions of a Son, a show growing out of Evans' first place award at the 2013 SlowExposures juried show. Evan's work is deeply personal and also documentary, linking his own coming-to-terms with his late father and the economic crisis faced by many Southern small towns while Southern big cities boom.

Chapter Four, for October 23, 2014, features the pop-up show organized and presented by a group of photographers collectively known as The Posse, and individually known as Lori Vrba, Bryce Lankard, Ann George, Anne Berry, and S. Gayle Stevens.

Their installation, called Time, Place, and Eternity: Flannery O’Connor and the Craft of Photography, went up in Chris Curry's horse barn. Aline Smithson, writing for Lenscratch,  calls it "one of the most interesting and innovative exhibitions I’ve seen in a long while.

Chapter Five, for October  25th, 2014, features the Do Good Fund's growing collection of Southern photography, focusing on its show at this year's SlowExposures, under the title Brought to Light, presented at the Whiskey Bonding Barn and curated by Constance Lewis.

Chapter Six, for October 26th, 2014, features a second pop-up show that was part of SlowExposures this year, this one entitled Off the Page, featuring work by the Southlight Salon of Nashville —Jerry Atnip, Nick Dantona, Robert McCurley, Jerry Park, Mark Mosrie, Rick Smith, and Chuck Arlund.

Great for SlowExposures to get this kind of, well, exposure. 

The Lenscratch folks nailed it when they said, "The entire show was filled with stellar work."

Make sure you check this out.

Susan Harbage Page in Italy, and in North Carolina

Distinguished Southern Photographer Susan Harbage Page is opening a show of work from her Objects from the Borderlands: The US-Mexico "Anti-Archive" Project portfolio in Rome, at La Stellinia Arte Contemporanea (The Gallery of Contemporary Art) in Rome, Italy.

Harbage Page describes this work as capturing a "collection of objects found along the border between the United States and Mexico that witness a silent immigration that people do not want to see."

Harbage Page says she "began this work on the border after I heard a radio broadcast on National Public Radio. 

"They said that 20% more women and children than men die crossing the U.S.–Mexico border without official papers. I couldn’t get this statistic out of my head, so I decided to go see it with my own eyes. 

"I began to make yearly pilgrimages to the border to photograph the objects that are left behind by border-crossers. 

"The objects that I find speak of a difficult journey and the risks that these individuals are exposed to when they enter the United States. 

"I didn’t want to photograph the individuals in the traditional documentary manner—media and popular culture already do this. I wanted to show these left-behind objects as reliquaries, imbued with power." 

If you are in Rome, the Gallery is at 93 Via Braccio da Montone. There will be a reception and artist's talk at the Gallery on Friday, October  24th, 2014, at 6:00 in the afternoon.

We've discussed this work before, here and here, and it's really great to see this work receiving attention in another country where the possibility of a better life tempts large numbers of people to risk literally everything for the chance to pursue it.

Page is also busy this month, with work in two group shows in the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill area as part of the CLICK! Triangle Photography Festival.

 

The first is now up at Light Art + Design in Chapel Hill, and features photography by Taj Forer, Jimmy Fountain, Susan Harbage Page (see image above), Harrison Haynes, Jeff Whetstone, and Laura Williams.

This show is up through October 25th, 2014 at 601 West Rosemary Street, in Chapel Hill, open from 11:00 to 6:00 pm every day except Sundays and Mondays.

The second show is at the Flanders Gallery in  Raleigh, at  302 South West Street, up now through October 29th, 2014, on Wednesdays through Saturdays from 11:00 -6:00 pm

In addition to Harbage Page, this show of photographers and artists in other media includes the work of Derek Toomes, Damian Stamer, Lydia Anne McCarthy, Kenn Kotara, Ian F.G. Dunn, Bill Sullivan, Mia Yoon, Holly Fischer, Ashlynn Browning, Jason Craighead, and Peter Glenn Oakley.

Great to see Harbage Page becoming both a locally- and internationally-celebrated photographer!

The Southern Photographer at ACP -- October 2014

The Southern Photographer was honored to take part last weekend in the Portfolio Review conducted as part of this year's Atlanta Celebrates Photography Festival.

We saw lots of fine work, much of it by photographers working in the American South, of whom we will have more to say in future posts.

For now, my thanks to Amy Miller and her staff members Waduda Muhammad and Michael Murphy for organizing an exceptionally well-run event.

Part of the event for us was a gallery tour, which included stops at Jackson Fine Art, the Hagedorn Foundation Gallery, the Lumiere Gallery, and the High Museum of Art. 

These stops were well-chosen to give us an overview of fine art photography from the days of black-and-white to the present, when shooters are using a wide range of imaging skills to expand photography's subject matter from direct representation of the external world to exploration of imaginative worlds and presentation of unique visual experiences.

 At the Jackson, gallery owner Anna Skillman treated us to delicious food and good conversation about the gallery's current exhibits of work by the European photographer Rudd van Empel, New York-based photographers Richard Selesnick and Nicholas Kahn, and Atlanta-based multimedia artist Carolyn Carr. 

At the Hagedorn,  Brenda Massie, the gallery's Director, showed us work by a wide range of contemporary photographers Not From Around Here.

This included the work Amy Miller and Waduda Muhammad are looking at in the image above, by Atlanta-based photographer Steve Aishman,  whose work comes with imbedded videos of the composition of the work, so that the image one sees on the wall is only the beginning of the visual experiences Aishman has to offer.

Also at the Hagedorn at the moment is work by New York-based (but educated at SCAD) photographer Claire Rosen and Argentinian photographer Guillermo Srodek-Hart.

Massie graciously showed us the storage room at the Hagedorn, crammed with an incredible array of work, among which I was glad to see Chapel Hill-based photographer Susan Harbage Page well represented. 

All of the work in view at the Hagedorn was presided over by this fine furry critter, who seemed not at all confident that we strangers were up to any good. 

Nearby, at Lumiere Gallery, owner Robert Yellowlees and his assistant Tony Casadonte gave us a tour of their historically-oriented current exhibits Masters of Photography,  including works by Berenice Abbot, Dorothea Lange, and other major 20th-century photographers, and Radiant Energy: Wynn Bullock, a show exploring the career of this distinguished photographer whose work is also on view now at the High Musuem of Art (see more on this below).

Yellowlees and Casadonte also showed us early results of their project to recover videotaped interviews of photographers, including Ansel Adams, from the heyday of large-format and documentary photography in California, just as photography was beginning to be recognized as a legitimate fine-art medium.

At the High, we were treated to a tour by Brett Abbott (see image below), the High's curator of photography.

Abbot spoke with well-deserved pride of the growing collection of photographs (now over 6,000 images), the opening of the Lucinda Bunnen Gallery, a space in the museum providing permanent exhibition space for photographs, and the current major show, a retrospective of photographs by distinguished American photographer Wynn Bulloch. 

The Bunnen Gallery honors Lucinda Bunnen, long-time Atlanta photographer, patron of the arts, and creator of the Lucinda Bunnen Collection of photographs at the High Museum.

Abbott also pointed out how photography is also included in the High's general display galleries when appropriate for the gallery, not isolated in designated display areas.

One example is the large-scale photograph shown to the right in the image above, by world-renowned contemporary photographer Thomas Struth, made in the Atlanta aquarium and on exhibit in the High's galleries of contemporary art. 

On a personal note, the guy in the white cap in the image above is the witty, personable, and exceptionally knowledgeable New York-based photography collector, curator, and consultant W. M. (Bill) Hunt, also in Atlanta to participate in the ACP Portfolio Review. 

I hope to catch up with Bill later this month when he  gives a talk at Raleigh's Contemporary Art Museum; for details of Bill's appearance at CAM Raleigh, go here.

The opportunity to view even a small sample of the photography currently on view in Atlanta is an excellent reminder of the range and diversity of imaging techniques and artistic visions now being employed by fine art photographers.

It is also an excellent reminder of how Atlanta has become an international center of interest in photography, making a home for outstanding galleries and exceptional museum collections, and for ACP, the festival that pulls all this richness together for us every October.

CLICK! in the Triangle

We in the Triangle are having our own festival of photography this October, titled CLICK!  

A full schedule of events is here. 

For those unfamiliar with North Carolina, the Triangle is of course the Research Triangle, bounded to the west by Chapel Hill, to the North by Durham, and to the east by Raleigh. witht e Research Triangle Park in the middle.

Major events for CLICK! -- in addition to the John Menapace and Elizabeth Matheson shows we discussed earlier, at the Gregg Museum here in Raleigh and at the Cameron Allen Gallery in Durham -- include special exhibitions at Chapel Hill's Ackland Museum, Raleigh's North Carolina Museum of Art, and Durham's Center for Documentary Studies. 

Together they provide an overview of photographic practice from its beginnings to the present, as well as an in-depth look at some of the many ways contemporary  photographers are going about their work. 

The show at the Ackland (the art museum of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) is entitled Photovision: Selections from a Decade of Collecting, now up through January 4th, 2015.

The Ackland collects photographs that illustrate the history of photography as a practice from its beginnings to the present. 

The current show has on offer about 150 images that have been added to the Ackland's collection in the past ten years, organized into thematic groups, including "Photography and Multiplicity," "Sacred Spaces" (see image above), "Process and Product," and "Staging the Image."

The show at the NC Museum of Art in Raleigh is entitled Private Eye: Allen G. Thomas Jr. Photography Collection and features a large collection of contemporary photographs recently given to the museum by Allen Thomas. This show is up now through March 22nd, 2015.

Thomas, a resident of the small eastern North Carolina town of Wilson, has amassed over the past few years a major collection of contemporary photography. This represents his second major gift to the museum's collection.

For this gift to the NCMA, he has chosen a selection of work by the following shooters:

Jeff Bark, Matthew Baum, Jordi Bernadó, Jesse Burke, Anthony Goicolea, Bill Jacobson, Chris Jordan, Sze Tsung Leong (see image above), Chris McCaw, Ryan McGinley, Zwelethu Mthethwa, Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison, Jack Pierson, Kerry Skarbakka, Alec Soth, and Shen Wei.

The NCMA describes the show as presenting "a range of photographic techniques and processes, from straightforward photography to highly manipulated, staged, and constructed images," including "expressive portraits, otherworldly landscapes, and abstractions of the natural world." 

The NCMA -- and the state of North Carolina -- are fortunate to have in Allen Thomas a patron who combines outstanding aesthetic sensibilities and a passion for photography with a generosity of spirit and a willingness to share his gifts with his fellow citizens. 

October brings two shows to Duke's Center for Documentary Studies in Durham. 

Up now through this weekend is a show entitled  Hard Art, DC 1979: Photographs by Lucian Perkins.

Perkins (see image above), a two-time Pulitzer Prize winning photographer, offers here a series of black and white images that document, according to the folks at CDS " the early days of a hardcore punk scene in the nation’s capital on the eve of the Reagan presidency, an enormously influential artistic and cultural movement inspired by then unknown bands like Bad Brains, the Teen Idles, and the Slickee Boys."

Opening October 27th and up through January 24, 2015 at CDS is a show of work entitled City under One Roof by Jen Kinney (see image above), winner in 2013 of the Dorothea Lange–Paul Taylor Prize for documentary photography.

Kinney explores in this body of work “shared spaces" in Whittier, Alaska, a town she describes as an “unlikely crossroads of community and solitude, isolation and claustrophobia.” 

A community of just over 200 people, 90% of whom live in one 14-story building, Whittier is one of the most isolated communities in the USA.

Kinney documents in this work, as she puts it, "how the structures that people inhabit shape and order their lives; how, in turn, people construct, alter, and destroy spaces; and how these constant renovations to our physical world mirror changes in the stories that we tell ourselves, and how we structure our lives to these stories."

Much fine photography to see in the Research Triangle this October, and many thanks to the folks at CLICK! for organizing and coordinating it!

John Menapace at the Gregg Museum, Matheson at the Craven Allen Gallery

The Gregg Museum of Art and Design at NC State University in Raleigh is having a major retrospective exhibition of the work of John Menapace.
  
Entitled Smokes and Mirrors: Reflections of the Self in Photographs by John Menapace, the show draws heavily on the archive of images and negatives Menapace bequeathed to the Gregg Museum at his death in 2010. 

The Gregg is located at 1903 Hillsborough Street, in Raleigh. This will be the permanent home of the Gregg once construction of new and expanded exhibition space is completed.

For the time being, this show is open by appointment between 9 and 5 on weekdays. One can arrange to see the show by calling 919.513.7244 or 919.515.3503, or by emailing Zoe Starling, the Museum's exhibit manager.



Menapace, who died in 2010, was a native of Pennsylvania who moved to North Carolina in 1956. 

The story goes that in 1955, Menapace bought a second-hand camera to take on a trip to Mexico. He never got to take the trip, but he held onto the camera. 

Menapace began to earn recognition for his photographs in the early 1970's, when he also began to teach photography at Duke University, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and also at the Penland School of Crafts in western North Carolina.

In 1984, the NCMA recognized the importance of Menapace's work by giving him their first show devoted solely to photography.  

He is widely credited with creating a tradition of fine art photographic practice in North Carolina, both through his own work and through the work of generations of North Carolina photographers whom he taught or inspired.

Among the first generation of his students were Elizabeth Matheson and Caroline Vaughan, who along with Menapace were among the first photographers collected in depth by the North Carolina Museum of Art.

This show of his work at the Gregg reminds us that Menapace had an unerring eye for design and composition. One has a very strong sense that in his often complex arrangements of items in an image everything is in the right place. 

Gene Thornton, reviewing a show of John's work in the New York Times, pointed out Menapace's "impeccable taste and a faultless sense of design," transforming "perfectly ordinary bits of landscape - the curved border of a garden pond, a cyclone fence silhouetted against a hazy sea - into elegant semi-abstractions in black and white." 

The Gregg show also offers us a more playful side of Menapace's work, especially in the series of self-portraits which show Menapace posing for his camera while wearing an interesting series of outfits and hats, but always holding his apparently ever-present cigarette. 
 
Menapace's show is being mounted as part of the CLICK! Triangle Photography Festival, now unfolding in the neighboring cities of Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, NC.

The distinguished Raleigh-based photographer David Simonton will discuss Menapace's work at the Gregg on Thursday, October 23rd, 2014, at 6:00 pm.

Elizabeth Matheson (see image above), one of Menapace's first students, has her own show up now, also as part of the CLICK! Festival, with work from her CUBA portfolio of new work, at the Craven Allen Gallery in Durham. 

Matheson's work is clearly grounded in Menapace's devotion to composition, to the organized display of forms and relationships, although she uses color and engages with people in ways that expand the range of concerns she learned from Menapace. 

Wonderful to have both of them on display during this first CLICK! Festival.

Kathleen Robbins in Competition for Visual Artist of the Year

Columbia, SC-based photographer Kathleen Robbins is a finalist for Visual Artist of the Year in central South Carolina, in a competition hosted by JASPER, the arts magazine for the Columbia, SC area.

We can help.

We can help Robbins to some well-deserved recognized, and, at the same time, help support photography as a fine art discipline. The other two artists in the running are painters. 

You can see the full list of finalists if you go here.  Scroll down past the Theatre and Music folks until you get to the Visual Arts section.

Then, go to this page here and click on the link to the Artists of the Year Ballot, choose Kathleen Robbins, and register your vote.

I just voted. You have until midnight on November 3rd to cast your vote.

Winners announced on November 21st, 2014.

Go Kathleen Robbins!

Alec Soth Photographs in Georgia, Or, How Not to Become an Honorary Southern Photographer

In the process of setting up this blog, I felt the need to designate some of the folks whose work shows up here as Honorary Southern Photographers. 

These are photographers who are Not From Around Here, as we say, but who engage in their work with the complex narratives and experiences of family, race, gender, class, and economic exploitation that constitute the legacy of Southern history for Southerners, seeking to make meaning out of that legacy in the present-day South.

These issues are at the heart, for example, of the writings of William Faulkner, especially that group of novels -- Go Down, Moses, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom -- that I believe represent his most enduring achievements. 

Over the years the list of Honorary Southern Photographers has grown to include, among others, folks like Carrie Mae Weems, Dana Mueller, Dawoud Bey, Eugene Richards, Magdalena Solé, and Myra Greene.

This list does not include, however, the name of Alec Soth, even though he has worked in the South on more than one occasion. He did some, although not nearly the majority, of the images in his signature Sleeping by the Mississippi portolio in the South. He did a portfolio of work for the High Museum in Atlanta as part of their ongoing "Picturing the South" series, back in 2009. 

Long-time readers of the blog will remember that I was not happy with Soth's work for the High Museum. 

His work on that commission seemed to me then, as it still does to me now, superficial and derivative, trying through technique to elevate the quirky, the random, and the bizarre to the level of the profound. 



Samples of Soth's more recent work published recently in the New York Times do nothing to change my mind. The back story for this body of work, however, clarifies Soth's working method in ways that help me understand my response to his work. 

Turns out, Soth made this work -- all in the state of Georgia -- in a two-week period, during which Soth and his buddy, writer Brad Zellar, traveled over 2400 miles.

So, a flying trip -- that's an average of nearly 200 miles a day, which reminds me of the old joke about someone on those old package tours of Europe, where you were promised you would see it all, seven countries in seven days. So, the inevitable question is, "Where are we?" to which the answer is, of course, "I don't know, but since its Thursday, it must be Belgum."

Well, in this case, every day it was somewhere in Georgia, but unlikely to have been the same place two days in a row. But what helped these guys was, they knew what they were looking for before they went. 

The title of the NY Times portfolio draws, of course, on language that is part of a whole tradition of cliches about the South. It is "Southern Gothic: Hunting for the peculiar soul of Georgia." 

As Zellar points out in a sidebar interview, he and Soth were looking for the "peculiar" in Georgia, starting from the assumption that the complex state of Georgia has a single "soul," and that the soul of Georgia is peculiar, and that they could find that peculiarity. 

Zellar says, "The South was a source of fascination [for me] from a very early age, and by the time I was in high school, I had keyed in on Georgia as a confounding, fascinating and almost mythical place." To Zellar, Georgia was "weird, contradictory."

So, Georgia is "Gothic," "peculiar," "confounding," "mythical," "weird," and he's known it was that way for him since he -- and Soth -- were in high school in Minnesota. 

Thing is, Soth has built a career on being able to find the "peculiar" and "weird," even in Minnesota, witness the image above. He certainly does not need to be in Georgia to do so.

But now he is 42 (this whole trip was part of a birthday celebration for Soth at 42), and he's learned what to photograph to help advance his career, and since he knows that's what he wants to photograph, that's what he will find when goes out to photograph. 

Especially if he is covering 2400 miles in two weeks. Not much time there to look around, to be surprised, to engage deeply and responsibly with the people he meets. 

Some of Soth's photographs in this portfolio suggest that he ran across people with interesting stories to tell, or situations to account for, or understandings to disclose, but we won't find that kind of engagement or respect or concern in this work. 

Strange thing is, in Zellar's comments there is the core of a real idea. He notes that in Georgia we've got "the whole history of the country played out there at one time or another: the Revolutionary War, slavery, the Civil War, the Great Depression, the civil-rights movement and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr." 

Zellar says, they found in Georgia "incredible poverty and segregation and  . . . bastions of immense wealth." Sounds like Georgia is therefore the Real America in microcosm, or, the words of Arlo Guthrie, "Good morning, America, how are you? Don't you know me, I'm your native son." 

So there is here, an idea, of Georgia as what it really means to be America. 

But Georgia persists, for Zellar, and therefore, presumably for Soth as well, to be "an entirely different planet from the world I was familiar with . . . absolutely nothing like any of the other states we visited."

This is, in microcosm, the conundrum of the South, to be the most quintessentially American place in America, yet for America at large to remain "an entirely different planet . . . absolutely nothing like any of the other states."

Soth's work in the South shows us surfaces and cliches (how many more photographs of kudzu about to overwhelm the built environment do we really need?), seeks to make peculiar what is to us ordinary, demonstrates in his work down here the same capacity he showed in his early work of finding the quirky and the sad, whether he is in Minnesota or Georgia.

There is no denying that Soth is a very skilful and successful photographer. In spite of his success, however, Soth continues to contribute to cliched images of the South. 

I'm sure he doesn't care, but for those reasons, Alec Soth is unlikely to join my list of Honorary Southern Photographers.