Southern Photographers at Look3

The 2015 edition of the Look3 Festival of the Photograph was held last weekend in Charlottesville, VA.

Look3 involves a transformation of Charlottesville into a temple of photography through outdoor projections of photographs, gallery and museum shows, artists' talks and panel discussions, and multitudinous workshops. 

One has the feeling of total immersion into the practice of photography, or, as they like to put it, 3 Days of Peace, Love, and Photography.

There's a definite Southern vibe, too. Note the photograph above, from Look3's website, and consider how it captures the world of Southern university towns. 

Artists featured this year included Larry Fink, Zanele Muholi, Walter Iooss, Alec Soth, Vincent J. Musi, David Alan Harvey, Monica Haller, Sally Mann, Piotr Naskrecki, and Andrea Douglas.

If, like me, you weren't able to make this year's Festival, you can get at least  the flavor of the event by checking out the Festival's blog, here, as well as Look3's website, here, and these photographs from Photowings, here.
 

Look3 is definitely a Southern photography event.

This year, however, the irrepressible Lori Vrba (see image above), along with her equally irrepressible colleagues Eliot Dudik (see image below),and Mike Smith (see image second below), conspired to make the event even more deeply Southern.

They did this by working with DOMA Fine Art of Charlotte, NC to create a pop-up show of their work, called Southern Vernacular.

Vrba is the Queen of Pop-Up, having made significant waves with her pop-up shows in New Orleans and rural Georgia.
  
 Now, in Charlottesville, she has continued that tradition.  
 
Southern Vernacular brought together Vrba's visionary neo-romanticism with Smith's realism and Dudik's meditations on today's Southern landscape and its tangled history. 

DOMA Fine Art describes the Southern Vernacular Pop-Up this way: 

"By bringing together these well known photographers from Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee, the exhibition creates a dialogue between these artists who share a deep connection to the South, a unique relationship with their subjects and a precocious ability to explore and articulate southern identity."

So, there you have it, at least some of the news from Look3, in Charlottesville.