Southern Photography

Jeff Rich is Another Photographer Who is Off to a Big Start in 2012

2012-01-31T16:42:00.001-05:00

Not content to rest on his laurels after reeling in the book publication prize in 2010's Critical Mass competition, Savannah-based photographer Jeff Rich has just closed a group show of landscape photography at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Jacksonville, Florida, and has a host of events ongoing and upcoming.

His work -- featured earlier on this blog -- about Erwin, Tennessee resident Steve Harris and the Nuclear Contamination of his property is featured in Jennifer Schwartz' The Ten Project.

His Photolucida book, Watershed: The French Broad River, will be published in February 2012.

AND, Jeff will have a solo show of the Watershed portfolio at Jennifer Schwartz Gallery, opening on February 3rd, with a reception from 6-9. The show will be up at the Jennifer Schwartz Gallery through March 17th.

Jeff's images are part of a post-Ansel Adams movement in American, and Southern, landscape photography that is about the relationship between the human and the landscape. His photographs look wonderful on the web, but they have a luminosity in person that simply does not come through online.

My point -- his work is very much worth your getting to Atlanta, and to Jennifer Schwartz's gallery, to have a look at. My guess is, this is only the beginning of a really special year for Jeff.

Southern Images In the Galleries -- January 2012

2012-01-27T15:17:00.003-05:00

Some museum and gallery news of photographers young and photographers old, including 4 items of interest.

1. Kathleen Robbins and Eliot Dudik, faculty members in photography at the University of South Carolina at Columbia, along with some of their students are opening a show of photographs this weekend at Tapp's Arts Center, 1644 Main Street, in Columbia.

This show will be up through February, and you can learn more about it on Tapp's Art Center's Facebook page.

2. Duke's Center for Documentary Studies is opening a major show of color photographs taken by a variety of photographers during the Depression, up in the Juanita Krepps Gallery at CDS now through July 23rd, 2012 in their home at 1317 W. Pettigrew Street, in Durham.

This show is called Full Color Depression, and some of the images on view were made in the South (like the one above by Jack Delano), and you can learn more about the show here and preview some of the images here.

They were shot on Kodachrome, which Kodak took away, contrary to Paul Simon's wishes, just before Kodak itself went belly up.

3. The International Center for Photography in New York City now has up a major exhibition of work by the South African photographer Grey Villet now up through May 6th, 2012.

The show is called The Loving Story: Photographs by Grey Villet and includes images made by Villet while he was working for Life Magazine in 1958 on assignment in Virginia documented the lives of the Lovings, an interracial couple who were married in 1958 in Washington, DC.

They settled in Virginia, but were soon arrested by Virginia authorities for violating the state's laws against interracial marriages.The Lovings eventually were vindicated by the US Supreme Court, which in 1967 declared such laws unconstitutional.

Villet shot 73 rolls of film in this assignment, but Life Magazine published only 9 of his images.The ICP now has a major show of this work on view, mostly for the first time anywhere.

4. Finally, the New York Times reports William Eggleston has decided to make digital enlargements of some of his iconic images to benefit his Foundation.

He is blowing up 36 photographs he made in the Mississippi Delta in the '70's and '80's from their original 16-by-20-inch prints and printing them in a new, oversize format at 44x60 inches. He plans to sell the entire collection at Christie's on March 12 to benefit the Eggleston Artistic Trust.

I've seen wall-sized prints made digitally from some of Walker Evans' WPA photographs and they are stunning. Eggleston's work should be equally commanding in a larger format.

South Light Photographers -- Salon and Group Show in Nashville

2012-01-25T10:13:00.001-05:00

South Light is a group of photographers in Nashville, and it consists of Chuck Arlund, Jerry Atnip, Nick Dantona, David Robert Farmerie, Robert McCurley, Mark Mosrie, Jerry Park, and Pierre Vreyen.

These guys -- experienced photographers all -- have found each other in Nashville, and have formed a Salon, and are now having a group show called Southern Light: The South through Eight Lenses, up at The Arts Company, at 215 5th Avenue of the Arts, in Nashville through February 18th, 2012.

You can sample the work on offer in the show by going here, to the website of The Arts Company.

They have taken the opportunity of the group show to expand the event into a photography festival, with a talk by Sylvia Plachy, a portfolio review coming up on February 4th, and a host of other presentations, exhibits, and receptions. You can find the entire schedule here.

I'm hoping this festival will be the precursor of things to come. The guys have what they need to build on -- a sense of purpose, a mission statement, and high aspirations for what they have begun. They are establishing themselves as "an expert resource for the photographic and art community through lectures, workshops and exhibitions."

They say, "The genesis of the name is an indication that photographic art is alive and well below the Mason-Dixon Line."

Which is good to know.

Their "common Artistic Statement" commits them to "participate in a model of art, which is holistic; a meeting of the conscious and unconscious, thought and emotion, spiritual and material, private and public," to "endeavor to make art that is the visible manifestation, evidence and facilitator of the soul’s journey," and to "make photographs as a quest for authenticity and a plea for the rediscovery of connection."

There is much fine work here, much to celebrate in this year's Festival, and much to hope for as they make plans for future events. Keep us posted, guys.

Marilyn Suriani Makes the Atlantic Cities Blog Two Weeks in a Row

2012-01-24T12:17:00.001-05:00

Marilyn Suriani has been photographing in places far removed from her home in Atlanta.

Her shot of Tokyo is featured on the Atlantic Cities blog this week, a happy follow-up to the appearance of her photograph from Key West last week. Who knows what might show up next week.

Sometimes, good things happen repeatedly. And congratulations to Marilyn!

Upcoming Show -- Puppy Love in Zebulon, Georgia

2012-01-23T10:45:00.000-05:00

What do the folks behind the Slow Exposures Southern Photography Festival and SXSE do in their spare time? Run a photography competition, of course.

The annual Puppy Love Show at A Novel Experience Bookstore in Zebulon, GA will be up from January 30th through February 25th, 2012, with a closing reception on the 25th, featuring hot dogs, of course.

Puppy Love is a juried photo exhibition held each February, featuring images of dogs being dogs. All profits go to local animal shelters and to guide and assistance dogs for returning soldiers injured in combat.

This year's jurors were Jerry Atnip and Paul Conlan, and the Winner of Best in Show (see image above) is Shannon Johnstone, my friend who is Associate Professor of Studio Art at Meredith College, here in Raleigh.

Other winners in this year's Puppy Love Competition include Kathryn Kolb, Anne Berry, Donna Black, Valerie Hayes, Donna Rosser, Gary Gruby, and Beau Gentry, and you can see all their work on on the new Puppy Love Facebook page

Oen more word about Shannon Johnstone -- she is passionate about dogs, and she is also passionate about animal rights and the issues around animal overpopulation. Look at her portfolio Breeding Ignorance only if you are ready for some heartbreak.

Marilyn Suriani on the Atlantic Cities Blog

2012-01-20T18:14:00.001-05:00

Atlanta-based photographer Marilyn Suriani is the latest photographer to be featured for her image of Southern urban life on the atlanticcities blog.

Suriani's image is of a laundromat in Key West, Florida, a booming metropolis of 25, 000 with its own distinctive culture.

Its been great to have all these images of Southern town- and cityscapes on the atlanticcities blog this week, and there are so many other places to hear from and photographers to feature.

I can only hope Amanda keeps up this focus for a while longer.

Pamela Pecchio and Brooke White on One, One Thousand in January

2012-01-20T17:53:00.009-05:00

Photographers featured this month on One, One Thousand are Charlottesville, VA-based Pamela Pecchio and Oxford, MS-based Brooke White.

Pecchio's portfolio, On Longing, Distance and Heavy Metal, has, she says, grown out a time when she felt physically divided between her professional and her personal spaces, and had to drive regularly for long distances to move from one place to the other. She made these transitions through the landscapes of North Carolina and Virginia to the sound of heavy metal music.

Pecchio began to stop on her journeys to make images out of her passion for heavy metal music and for these Southern landscapes which for her have the same quality of enveloping, of temporarily holding the viewer "inside a tangled web," inside a place that has a solid foundation, and layers, and is "complicated, often unbalanced, dense, and shares a story."

You can see more of this portfolio, here, on Pecchio's website. She does a remarkable job of finding strong compositions among the tangled and twisted linbs of trees and bushes, and perhaps among the tangled feelings of divided loyalties and the tangled sounds of heavy metal music.

Brooke White's portfolio is called Delta Constant and its images document similarities in delta landscapes even though the actual places are separated by thousands of miles, from the Mississippi Delta to the deltas of the Tana River in Kenya and the Mekong River in Viet Nam.

White's work usually is about "the ways in which tourism, agriculture, politics and technology affect our connection to the landscape."

Here, she is more engaged in questions of geographical similarity, of visual congruity, in the contemplation of the confluence of land and water, of lines that lead away into the distance, of the ways in which an inland tract of land like the Mississippi Delta has visual similarities with deltas that are formed when big rivers meet the ocean.

The folks at One, One Thousand have an uncanny ability to find -- month by month -- wonderful Southern photographers who are making art out of their experience of their region. Keep it up, folks!

Christian Harkness is the Latest Southern Photographer on the Atlantic Cities Blog

2012-01-20T11:33:00.001-05:00

Florida-based photographer Christian Harkness is the latest Southern photographer to have work featured by Amanda Erickson on the Atlantic Monthly's atlanticcities blog.

Christian lives and photographs in Cedar Key, FL, a booming metropolis of 800 on the Gulf Coast of Florida.

Christian also had work in the November online issue of SXSE Magazine.

Good work here. Good to see it -- and the life Christan documents -- getting well-deserved recognition.

Even More Good News for Kathleen Robbins

2012-01-19T14:16:00.002-05:00

Columbia, SC-based photographer Kathleen Robbins continues to be celebrated for her work. Since our last report, she's been featured on NPR on the subject of cotton's role in Southern culture and the economy. She will also be a participant in a show at the Light Factory in Charlotte, NC, beginning January 30th, 2012, and up through May 6th, 2012.

The Light Factory is Charlotte's museum of photography and film, and is at 345 North College Street in downtown Charlotte (except they call it uptown, for reasons unknown to anyone who doesn't live there).

This show, called The Calm Before the Storm, will be in the Light Factory's Knight Gallery, and will also include work by Eric Tomberlin, Camille Seaman, and Pipo Nguyen-duy.

Eric Tomberlin has some Southern connections (go here), but Camille and Pipo, though clearly fine photographers, are, as they say, Not From Around Here.

The Light Factory says this show is intended to continue an examination of our "relationship with the environment, a photographic theme that began with the influential 1975 exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape," originally held at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, but since recreated (in 2010) at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA).

"New Topographics," the Light Factory goes on, "rejected the 19th century romanticized view of the environment and focused on the intervention of industry—land transformed by human presence, directly and/or indirectly. Today, we are asking if this precarious relationship has gotten better, is currently at a standstill, or has gotten much worse?

"The Calm before The Storm includes . . . photographers who are exploring the external landscape and who understand the paradoxes inherent in the juxtapositions of man and the natural environment."

Congratulations to Kathleen and to all these photographers. I'm looking forward to the show in Charlotte.

Jerry Siegel at the Mobile Museum of Art

2012-01-18T09:27:00.003-05:00

Birmingham, Alabama-based photographer Jerry Siegel -- whose work is featured today on theatlanticcities blog -- has also opened a show of his work at the Mobile Museum of Art, now up through April 1, 2012.

The show, entitled Facing South: Portraits of Southern Artists, includes 100 portraits Jerry has made over the last several years of Southern painters, writers, photographers, and sculptors (like the one of North Carolina's John Menapace, above).

You can see a portfolio of selected images from ths show by going here.

The show was organized by the Jule Collins Smith Museum, in Auburn Alabama, in conjunction with the publication of this body of work last year by the University of Alabama Press in a book of the same name as the show.

Siegel's goal in this project has been "to create portraits of Southern artists which convey the creativity and character of this remarkable selection of people, and tell us something about the nature of the region itself."

UPDATE: There is a fine review of Siegel's show now in ArtsCriticATL, here.

Good to see these images, and good to see Jerry's work getting the recognition it deserves.

Daniel Echevarria is Today's Featured Shooter on the Atlantic Cities Blog

2012-01-17T16:36:00.001-05:00

Atlanta-based photographer Daniel Echevarria is the shooter for today's Postcard from Southern Cities on the Atlantic Monthly's atlanticcities blog.

The photograph (see above) was made on Atlanta's Moreland Street. Daniel says of it that it is part of a larger effort to "photograph areas of the city during a time of changing social and community dynamics."

Echevarria is well-known to readers of thsi blog because he is co-founder and co-editor of One, One Thousand | A Publication of Southern Photography, which features contemporary photography created in the Southeastern United States.

Presumably there will be another Postcard tomorrow from a Southern city on the blog. I'm hoping the shooter will again be a familiar figure to us.

Opportunity -- Southern Cities on The Atlantic's Cities Blog

2012-01-16T13:47:00.001-05:00

Amanda Erickson contacted me last week about using one of my images (see above) on the Atlantic Monthly's theatlanticcities blog, go here.

Amanda is interested in running each day this week more images from Southern cities.

She has opened this call for images up, so if you have work you would like to submit, send her a jpeg -- along with a blurb about the work you do and a link to your website-- to Amanda here:

atlanticcities.postcard@gmail.com

or here:

aerickson@theatlantic.com

And pass the word along to your friends.

Kathleen Robbins is Off to a Great Start in 2012

2012-01-13T17:01:00.000-05:00

Columbia, SC-based photographer Kathleen Robbins is off to a great start in 2012.

First of all, her portfolio In Cotton was named winner of the PhotoNOLA Portfolio Review Prize for 2011.

Now, Jennifer Schwartz has people voting for which of two of Kathleen's images Jennifer should buy.

Nothing like having people lining up to spend someone else's money for one's work.

Me, I voted for the image above. Your mileage may vary. Hope Jennifer has deep pockets because at the moment the choice "Buy Both!" is well ahead in the voting.

Congratulations to Kathleen -- keep us posted as to what the rest of 2012 will bring.

SXSE for January 2012

2012-01-13T16:14:00.003-05:00

The new year brings the new online issue of South by Southeast (SXSE), the magazine of photography in the Southeast.

This issue is Volume 3, #1 -- a tribute to Nancy McCrary and all the folks at SXSE who have worked so hard to develop and sustain this remarkable enterprise through two complete volumes and now into their third volume and into the future. They also have their first real on-paper issue, go here

The new on-line issue is called The Travel Issue, and it shows Southern photographers getting out in the world to have a look around and to bring back image fo what they've seen.

I'm especially pleased that so many of the photographers featured in this issue are several from North Carolina, including Hillsborough's Elizabeth Matheson (who brings us images of Italy), Durham's Christopher Sims (who brings us image of Guantanamo Bay), Raleigh's Diana Bloomfield (who takes us to Coney Island), and Durham's Titus Brooks Heagens, (who takes us to Japan, see image above).

Other shooters with work in this issue inclue Thomas Neff (images of Europe and Asia), Andy Levin (images of Jacmel, in Haiti, and Lucinda Bunnen (images of Burkina Faso).

And you can have access to it all, for a truly modest sum.

That's What I Like about the South, Part One -- The News from Laurens, SC

2012-01-13T15:02:00.003-05:00

Check out today's news from Laurens, SC, in today's New York Times, go here.

If you haven't heard already, a judge in Greenwood, S.C. has decided that the building housing the Redneck Shop, a shrine to the Ku Klux Klan, is now owned by Pastor David Kennedy (see image above by John Adkisson) and his tiny New Beginning Missionary Baptist Church.

Kennedy's congregation inherited it from a disgruntled follower of John Howard, the Klan leader who founded the shop.

As the New York Times puts it, "in a quirk of fate laced with lawsuits, religious conversions and a small-town Southern narrative Harper Lee might deliver, a black pastor will eventually control what just might be the most famous white supremacist shop in America."

The irony -- now that's what I like about the South.

Laura Noel's Law and Order on Best of 2011 List

2012-01-12T17:45:00.003-05:00

Atlanta-based photographer Laura Noel has had her book Law and Order Gets Me Through the Night included on a list of the best indie and self-published books of 2011.

This list was composed by Laurissa Leclair who runs the Indie Photobook Library at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC, and can be found here.

Laura's book is a photographic meditation on the TV show Law and Order. She says it is about her "addiction to the show coupled with raging insomnia. Since I can't sleep, and I'm watching the show, I thought I might as well shoot it off my laptop."

Leclair says it "pushes the boundaries of what a photobook can be" by being a set of fifty 3×2 inch individual cards showing scenes from the show captured during times of Laura's insomnia, a storage box and a miniature stand.

The viewer can arrange and rearrange the images, creating one's own rotating exhibition of these images, and showing them on the viewing stand.

Ordering information for Laura's book is available here.

Shelby Lee Adams in PDN Online

2012-01-12T12:48:00.001-05:00

Kentucky-based photographer Shelby Lee Adams has an essay on PDN Online, here, about his work with the people of Appalachia.

The essay is an excerpt from his most recent book, Salt & Truth, and deals with how Appalachian culture has shaped Adams' work, and how he regards his obligations to his subjects.

Catching Up with Jennifer Schwartz in January 2012 -- Jeff Rich, Lori Vrba, the Bus

2012-01-11T13:57:00.000-05:00

Some early January notes about events at Jennifer Schwartz Gallery in Atlanta --

1. The latest photographer to be featured in Schwartz's The Ten Project is Atlanta-based photographer Jeff Rich, who has on offer ten of his images from his new body of work made near Erwin, TN.

This work, made on the farm of Steve Harris, documents the effects of Steve's living so near the nuclear fuel processing plant of Nuclear Fuel Services (NFS) that he has received an enormous amount of radiation.

These matters are now in litigation, but Jeff's images bring us face to face with the consequences of unrestrained technological development in the rural South.

2. Jeff will also have a show of his work from his Watershed portfolio opening at the Jennifer Schwartz Gallery on February 3rd, 2012 and up through March 17th.

3. Lori Vrba's recent show at the Jennifer Schwartz Gallery was reviewed thoughtfully and affirmingly on the Atlanta-based website Burnaway, here.

And, finally,

4. Schwartz' Kickstarter project to buy a van and tour the country selling photographs was fully funded. So we can be on the watch for her photography-laden bus roaming the country in the near future.

Real SXSE at Christmas

2012-01-09T17:00:00.004-05:00

The Post brought several gifts at Christmas, including evidence of the extremely hard work by Nancy McCrary and all the folks at SXSE photomagazine: their first paper issue, volume I: Issue 1, 2011, which is a lot of ones, but worthy of a fine publication.

This project is, to echo the editor of SXSE on another subject, "the very best magazine on Southern photography we could wish for."

The paper issue features photographers who have been in the online version and others who haven't, and they are all fine shooters and include Annie Hogan, Kendall Messick, Jack Spencer, Anderson Scott, Shelby Lee Adams. Michael West, Joanna Knox, Birmey Imes, and Laura Noel.

There are also notes on books and on blogs and on gallery shows and on museums.

I've subscribed to the online version from the beginning, but I'm signing up for the paper version as well.

Christmas at Graceland

2011-12-18T21:27:00.003-05:00

In the words of Paul Simon, "I have reason to believe we all shall be received in Graceland."

Best wishes for Christmas and the holiday season to Southern photographers and photography fans everywhere!.

The Blog about Southern Fine Art Photography will be taking a short break for the Holidays.

Back soon for 2012!

Kathleen Robbins on Design Observer

2011-12-15T22:54:00.005-05:00

Kathleen Robbins has 19 of her wonderful images of cotton farmers in the Mississippi Delta on the Design Observer website today, go here.

This is splendid work, well worth your visit.

David Strohl and Aaron Canipe in One:One Thousand

2011-12-15T17:16:00.010-05:00

One:One Thousand is featuring two photographers for the end of 2011, Austin, TX-based photographer David Strohl (see image above) and Washington, DC-based photographer Aaron Canipe.

David is showing a portfolio of color images made in Savannah, GA, entitled To Drift Savannah. Aaron has on offer a portfolio of B&W work entitled My Aggravating Ways (see image below).

David's work is, according to David, the result of his growth as a photographer as he has sought out the unfamiliar parts of the urban space that is most familiar to him.

As he has wandered the streets of Savannah, he has become aware of "the complexities of the area" as well as his own "progression of understanding." The result is a body of work that David believes reflects his discovery of "a rich tapestry of cultural heritage—the people, the details, and the landscape itself [that] have become a deep and interwoven narrative."

David clearly has learned to develop a rapport with people he meets in the street, a necessary component of the kind of photography he offers in this portfolio. His subjects become collaborators with him in the creation of images that engage Southerners in the course of their daily lives. His images are well-seen; he honors his subjects as he presents them to us.

Aaron's work is more immediately personal, a meditation on the realities of pain, mortality, and loss instigated by the death of his grandfather Sam, a man to Aaron a "man of staunch independence and firm determination in love and faith."

Aaron here presents images that represent his goal of understanding his grandfather's world through images that become symbols, "concrete statues became dilapidated versions of our own mortality, bags on conveyor belts became coffin-like, and I saw jobs and tasks left undone all of which seemed to point to a Higher calling."

Aaron concludes, "After investigating his world, I realized his life had always seemed to point to something greater and perhaps spiritual. [T]he sorrows of death were fading away, only to reveal and follow the line of life past the grave and into a peaceful and natural afterlife."

This is challenging work for a photographer to take on, a search for depth within surface, for light in the gathering darkness. I suspect Aaron's grandfather would feel honored and appreciated by his grandson's efforts to apprehend his full measure as a man and to deal with his loss.

Good News from Nancy McCrary -- Mike Smith, SXSE

2011-12-14T18:03:00.008-05:00

Nancy McCrary reports exciting news for Tennessee-based photographer Mike Smith, who has been awarded the Lowe Foundation Prize for 2011, in the amount of $50,000, for his portfolio Seeing Rural Appalachia, A Photographic Journal (see image above).

Also, news which probably makes Nancy even more pleased, is that the first print edition of SXSE is out and available now.

This issue contains work by Laura Noel, Jack Spencer, Shelby Lee Adams, Birney Imes, Michael West, and a whole slew of others familiar and unfamiliar to readers of this blog.

You can see a preview of it here. Those who have been waiting to become subscribers now have no excuse.

This is a beautiful piece of work, a tribute to all the long hours and the love and the commitment to Southern photography that Nancy and her partners have put into this project.

Great work, y'all!

Lori Vrba's Opening at Jennifer Schwartz Gallery

2011-12-13T17:19:00.026-05:00

For those of us who could not get to Atlanta for the opening of Lori Vrba's show at the Jennifer Schwartz Gallery, at 1000 Marietta Street, in Atlanta, on Friday, December 3rd, at the reception from 6-9 pm, this video puts us in the space at the time.

Looks like a grand occasion. Congratulations to all!

Lori Vrba, "Southern Comfort" Talk from Jennifer Schwartz on Vimeo.

Looking at these images, I now realize that I saw Lori in Atlanta, in Jennifer Schwartz' Gallery, planning this show, while I was doing my whirlwind visit to ACP in October.

While I was taking in the work then on display, I noticed a tall woman speaking with a member of Jennifer's staff.Not knowing then what I know now, I missed the opportunity to say hello.

Lori's show is up through January 28th, so there's still time to see it in person, if you are in Atlanta.

A Day of Photography in Durham, NC

2011-12-12T12:12:00.005-05:00

Sometimes, lots of good things come together. Saturday was a day like that. Durham, NC, is a small Southern city still struggling to overcome the decline of the tobacco and textiles industries. But there are strong educational and cultural institutions in Durham, like Duke University and NC Central University, and the old warehouses are being turned into studios and condos and restaurants, and, at the moment -- at least for photography -- there are lots of great things going on.

Here's what was on offer in Durham, this past Saturday. Duke's Nasher Musuem, which has quickly established itself as a significant museum, especially in the display of modern and contemporary art, has up a major show of photography entitled Becoming: Photographs from the Wedge Collection.

The show, up through January 8th, 2012, includes over 110 photographs by more than 60 African and African Diaspora photographers (see image by Camilo Jose Vergara, above) assembled, in the Nasher's words to "explore how new configurations of black identity have been shaped by the photographic portrait over the past century."

This work is on loan from the collection of Dr. Kenneth Montague, who organized the exhibition. Montague has built up a substantial body of work of global scope, organized around its concern for exploring expressions of black identity.

Across the lobby of the Nasher is another show, The Deconstructive Impulse: Women Artists Reconfigure the Signs of Power, 1973-1991, which is up through the end of this year. This show is a survey of leading women artists "that examines the crucial feminist contribution to the development of deconstructivism in the 1970s and 1980s."

While not entirely about photography, still has major work by Cindy Sherman, Carrie Mae Weems (whose work is also featured in the Becoming show), and other women photographers active toward the end of the 20th century.

At the Center for Documentary Studies, just a mile or so away from the Nasher, is a show of work by winners in this year's CDS/Daylight Magazine competition for photography in the documentary tradition. On view is a major body of work by overall winner Tamas Dezsos.

These folks are from all over the place (literally, with home sites ranging from NYC to Italy to Spain to Singapore), though none are actually from the American South. The local connections, though, are several. One, that CDS is now a cultural center of sufficient renown to draw entries from all over the world to its competition.

Two, that, especially, the works of Baldomero Fernandez remind us that the rural South is now exceptionally difficult to distinguish from generic rural America. And three, that one of the winners is Shane Lavalette, who we know is spending the year roaming our region and photographing us for the High Museum in Atlanta.

Across town, at the TTL Gallery, at 503 East Chapel Street, in Downtown Durham, proprieter Roylee Duvall maintains the only gallery in central North Carolina devoted to photography. He has up a large body of work by Durham-based photographer Kevin Logge. Logge specializes in what he calls "hand-crafted photography," meditative studies of objects and faces made in the darkroom using historic and alternative photographic processes.

Just down the hill from TTL is the Bull City Arts Collaborative, at 401-B1 Foster Street, which at the moment has up an intriguing show of work by emerging Raleigh-based photographer Raymond Goodman. Goodman has set out to document the growing farm-to-table movement in North Carolina which is reviving small-scale farming all over the South, and especially in North Carolina.

This show is called BURLAP: Portraits of Piedmont Farmers, and it's up through the month both at the BCAC and next door at the Piedmont Restaurant, one of Durham's restaurants that serves food grown by local producers.

Back over near Duke's East Campus is Durham's Craven Allen Gallery, which has a strong representation of photographers among its artists, including Caroline Vaughan, one of North Carolina's master photographers.

On view right now is a compelling body of work by Durham-based photographer MJ Sharp, called LIGHT CACHE. This show's images (which you can see here) are haunting because they show us a world we cannot see, a world available only to the camera, and only after long, long exposures. You can see one example at the top of this entry, and also HERE:

MJ's photographs are taken at night, with large format cameras, and on film, and under natural light. Frank Konhaous, the curator, along with MJ, of this show, gets this work just about right: "With the moon as her muse and mid-century large-format bellows film cameras as machine, she creates imagery not possible with modern digital equipment. She quite literally awakens the night and makes the darkness sing."

OK, so, that's how I spent my Saturday in photography, and in Durham, NC, too.

There was still more -- I did see a sign that promised to direct me to something called "The Church of Photography," but I had to leave that to another day.

I think there is a renaissance of fine art photography in the South, and I think Durham is becoming a major center of it. Stay tuned.

Charleston for Thanksgiving

2011-12-12T10:28:00.009-05:00

We were in Charleston for Thanksgiving, and had the pleasure of looking in on a major photography show at the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, SC, called Masters in Photography, which will be up through January 8th, 2012.

The Gibbes' account of this show says that it "features twentieth-century, masters of photography selected from the Gibbes permanent collection and local private collections including works by Alfred Stieglitz, Margaret Bourke-White, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Berenice Abbott, and many more."

There are some of these big names' greatest hit images in the show, but what is even more engaging are the number of images in the show made by major photographers who did work in Charleston and the surrounding area. Works on exhibition include an image by Robert Rauschenberg (who knew he was a photographer as well as painter?) as well as images by Walker Evans and other WPA photographers who worked in the Charleston area as well as lsewhere in the South.

Also, there is a show up at the Gibbes called Breaking Down Barriers: 300 Years of Women in Art, which includes work by a number of women photographers like Margaret Bourke-White, and color photographs by Sally Mann (again, who knew?).

We were also able to stop into the wonderful gallery run by Rebekah Jacob, at 169-B King Street, in downtown Charleston. Rebekah often (usually) has the work of Southern photographers on display, but right now she has up an elegant show of meditative landscapes by Seattle-based photographer Michael Kenna (see example above).

Rebekkah's gallery is an oasis of calm amid the hustle of busy downtown Charleston. It is one of the key places for getting to know the current renaissance of photography in the American South.

When you are in Charleston, a visit to the Rebekah Jacob Gallery is definitely in order.

December Issue of SXSE -- on the Mississippi Delta -- is Now Available

2011-12-07T15:23:00.001-05:00

The December 2011 issue of South x Southeast (or SXSE, as their friends call 'em) is now out, and it's an issue featuring, but not exclusively devoted to, the Mississippi Delta. There's a lot of New Orleans here, too, as well as Mr. Bennette's choice of Southern snowfall photographs.

This issue includes work by photographers familiar to readers of this blog, including Nell Dickerson, Debbie Fleming Caffery, and Magdalena Sole plus some new folks well worthy of our attention, like Will Steacy, Terri Garland, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and Dave Anderson.

Especially affecting are the portraits of Bibles rescued from flooded churches in the Central City and Lower Ninth Ward areas of New Orleans (see above).

In short, just what one would want from an e-zine of Southeastern photography in December.

You've got to subscribe to experience it all, but its a thriving operation and one truly worthy of your support.

Interesting NY Times Piece on Institutional Depictions of the Civil War

2011-12-07T10:39:00.002-05:00

There is a really interesting essay in today's NY Times about how museums in the South display artifacts and tell the story of the Civil War. Go HERE.

Edward Rothstein, the author, visited two museums in Richmond -- the Museum of the Confederacy and the Museum of the Virginia Historical Society -- and concludes that while in the North, memories of the Civil War are at heart institutional, in the South the War is remembered in personal terms.

Rothstein also concludes that there remains a conflict in Southern institutional memory between lingering white Southern grief, anger, and loss on the one hand and modern ethical judgments about the "Lost Cause" for which so many Southerners died.

He poses a final question, "How are loyalties to Southern culture to be reconciled with the evils of one of its fundamental institutions?"

The points he makes are deeply relevant to anyone who seeks to imagine the South, or to make sense of our history and culture through images. (Like Kathleen Robbins, see image above)

Openings and Events for December -- Vrba, SCOPE, Art Basil Miami, PhotoNOLA, me

2011-12-01T10:38:00.004-05:00

December 2011 is already shaping up to be a banner month for photographers in the South.

Chapel Hill-based photographer Lori Vrba, who has already been having a splendid year in her photography career, is now opening a major show at the Jennifer Schwartz Gallery, at 1000 Marietta Street, in Atlanta, this Friday, December 3rd, with a reception from 6-9 pm.

The show is called Southern Comfort, and includes images (such as the one above) and an installation, and Jennifer Schwartz promises it will be "like nothing you've ever seen before." She promises to have a video of the event to share later on this season.

That's before she and Vrba hit the road in their newly-funded bus.

Also opening or about to open across the South are a number of fairs, festivals, and the like, including SCOPE, through December 4th, in Miami, an umbrella event with lots of photography galleries involved, including the Aperture Foundation, Light Work, and others (full list here).

Also in Miami is Art Basil Miami Beach, through this weekend, with the work of over 600 artists on exhibition (go here for a full list), including Sally Mann and a slew of other major photographers.

PhotoNOLA is about to crank up in New Orleans, starting on December 8th and running through the 11th.

More on that later. But, finally, for right now, I will have a small number of pieces in a group show this month at the Exchange Gallery at Raleigh's Visual Art Exchange, opening Friday, December 3rd, Raleigh's First Friday, with a reception from 6-9 at the Visual Art Exchange in its new location at 309 West Martin Street in downtown Raleigh, near our new Contemporary Art Museum (CAM).

Aaron Blum, or the Problem of West Virginia

2011-11-29T10:07:00.002-05:00

The West Virginia-based photographer Aaron Blum is currently featured on Joerg Colberg's blog Conscientious with links to a fascinating portfolio of work called Born and Raised: Reflections of a World Set Aside, about the experience of living in West Virginia.

I highly recommend having a look at this work. It is strong work, and I am grateful to Joerg for bringing it to our attention.

Blum's work -- along with the way Blum talks about it -- raises questions of identity similar to questions one could raise about Florida or west Texas, in relationship to the American South.

Blum thinks of himself as living in a distinctive region of the country, in part definable as Appalachia.

There is of course lots of Appalachia in the South, and it has a distinctive cultural character that contributes to our overall identity as Southerners.

One can hardly imagine, for example, today's South without the music of Appalachia, without bluegrass or without Nashville or Memphis, where the music of Appalachia met the music of the Mississippi Delta.

There is also the issue of how a region is viewed.

Blum writes, on his website, that "Outsiders have long fictionalized the narrative surrounding Appalachia. As a resident of West Virginia I have always been aware of the views others hold of my home, and they have guided me to create my own version of life in the hills. My Appalachia is a granulated depiction based on the false impressions of others, my idealizations and personal experiences."

Blum also thinks of West Virginia as a land where "Light plays an important role," a place where a "warm southern sun creates a glow that pours over the mountains, rivers and forests creating long shadows, dark recesses and gray mists that blanket the landscape."

A warm southern sun -- Blum's sense of identity as a West Virginia photographer looks eastward to Virginia and southward, toward Kentucky and Tennessee and North Carolina. He is thinking of himself as a Southern photographer, or at least a photographer of the South.

Part of the purpose of an Artist's Statement is to direct the viewer's attention, to take a shot at establishing the terms of the conversation that will commence about one's work.

For Blum, the light of a southern sun has a "unique quality" that "is inherent to the hills and provides a catalyst to the imagination- a backdrop that becomes both magnificent and eerie. It is its own character within my story of Appalachia."

This brings us to the question of identity, especially of a Southern identity. Is it the light? Or the history?

When I set up this blog, I gambled on history, by deliberately including the states of the old Confederacy, even though I knew that subsequent events had given to places like Florida and west Texas an identity and a culture significantly different from the southeastern states.

West Virginia was created to have a history different from the history of Virginia at the defining moment of Southern history, so I've not regarded it as a Southern state.

I wonder what our friends over at SXSE think about this question.

Catching Up with the Blogs -- Forer, Simonton, Mead, Garner

2011-11-28T19:22:00.000-05:00

Former Chapel Hill-based photographer Taj Forer has a photo featured on FlakPhoto, here.

Raleigh-based photographer David Simonton is interviewed on the blog Two-Way Lens, go here.

Also, two young Charleston, SC- based photographers have been listed as among this year's best emerging artists in Charleston by Charleston Magazine.

They are Melinda Mead (see image above) and Nina Garner, both of whose work is definitely worth checking out.

PhotoNOLA on the Horizon

2011-11-18T15:48:00.001-05:00

Attention on the Southern Photography Festival Circuit now turns to New Orleans and its annual December photography festival, PhotoNOLA, opening December 8th and running through the 11th, 2011.

PhotoNOLA was started by the New Orleans Photo Alliance (NOPA), as one response to Hurricane Katrina, to celebrate photography and promote economic recovery in New Orleans.

This is the 6th PhotoNOLA, and you can learn all about it HERE, check the Calendar of Events HERE, learn about the Portfolio Review HERE, and see the full list of exhibitions HERE, and the Educational Events HERE.

One of the highly anticipated features of PhotoNOLA is the decision about the PhotoNOLA Review Prize. Each year, the reviewers at the Portfolio Review choose three portfolios to receive this award.

Last year's winners were Dallas, Texas-based photographer Jungeun Lee, Chapel Hill-based photographer Lori Vrba (see image above), and Fort Worth, Texas-based photographer Loli Kantor.

We will have a full report on this year's winners when they are announced, as well as news from the Festival as it rolls in.

McNair Evans in One One Thousand

2011-11-17T10:16:00.006-05:00

One One Thousand, the online portfolio of Southern photography, features in this issue the work of North Carolina native photographer McNair Evans, in a body of work named, appropriately, A Journal of Southern History.

The Journal of Southern History is, by the way, the official publication of the Southern Historical Association.

In Evans' portfolio of Southern images, the history is more personal and immediate than the JSH usually deals with. His concerns are with perennial Southern issues -- family, history, economic and personal loss, the relationships between the generations-- as they affected his family in Laurinburg, North Carolina.

Evans says of this work, "A Journal of Southern History combines emotive expression, persistence of family and a landscape of loss to reveal inherent dichotomies in my rural North Carolina home."

When Evans' father died, his family discovered to their surprise that he was a failure in business. The emotional after effects of this discovery were years in the unfolding. Evans realized in 2010, nine years after his father's death, that he was still dealing with the consequences.

Evans told friends in California that he was going home to North Carolina to find his father. The result is this body of work, an effort, says Evans, "to retrace his [father's] life using photography as a vehicle of resolution."

Evans goes on:

"I photographed his family, friends, schools and businesses while researching his character and actions. Within my immediate family, I witnessed intense affliction and perseverance. My subject became emotional states and the photographs narrate my journey between isolation and acceptance. Finally understanding that some questions can never be answered, this series evokes critical moods without definitive explanations."

Southerners know that Evans in this work is dealing with basic issues for all of us from "around here." So much of the Southern experience for natives is caught up in dealing with the past, and with the decisions our forebears made, and their afterlife. This is the Bible Belt, and for us one of the most haunting verses from that book is the one about how the sins of the fathers are visited on their children and their children's children.

Evans now lives and works in San Francisco, where this body of work has earned him the Curator's Choice Award in a competition sponsored by Santa Fe's CENTER for Photography. The juror, Erin O'Toole of San Francisco's MOMA, said of this work, "McNair Evans garnered first prize for his lyrical use of light. All of the photographs he submitted are suffused with a warm, moody glow. They are emotional pictures whose languid dreaminess is tinged with melancholy and a palpable sense of loss."

Southerners will recognize the "warm, moody glow" in Evans' photographs as one of the the distinctive characteristics of Southern light. I grew up about 30 miles from where Evans did, and many of his images hauntingly remind me of the landscapes I revisit when I go home.

This is rich, haunting work, enthusiastically recommended.

You can see more of his work here, at the Black Harbor website.

Do You Have This Photograph in Your Portfolio?

2011-11-17T09:35:00.000-05:00

Do you have a color photograph of a Civil War rifle mounted on the wall over a fireplace? Preferrably a 19th century fireplace?

An editor in NYC who is working with a new paperback edition of the novels of William Faulkner is looking for one, perhaps for use on the cover of Faulkner's novel Flags in the Dust.

Please email Mary McClean at mmcclean@randomhouse.com if you do, and attach a jpeg for her consideration.

One would think lots of people would have this shot, but I've checked with several people already, to no avail.

Can anyone help Mary out?

Great Interview with Susan Worsham!

2011-11-16T17:20:00.002-05:00

There is a great interview with Richmond-based photographer Susan Worsham, interviewed by Jonathan Blaustein, go HERE.

Well worth checking out!

Florida Issue of SxSE Magazine

2011-11-15T14:52:00.000-05:00

The November issue of South by Southeast Magazine is now out, and available for a modest contribution, here.

It's mainly about Florida. Now, I went swimming outdoors in the evening once in Florida (and northern Florida at that) and I was perfectly comfortable until it hit me that I was swimming outdoors, in the evening, and it was the middle of November.

I know its supposed to be hot in the South, but in Florida I was swimming outdoors, in the evening, in the middle of November.

So I've never been sure that Florida is in the South. I think it's Someplace Else. I think it's its own place.

I'm not sure where it is, exactly, but I do know that Miami or Tampa do not feel like Southern cities, the way Atlanta or Charlotte or Birmingham or Columbia or Memphis or Savannah or Richmond do.

But it IS there, wherever it is, and Nancy and all the crew at SXSE have made an exceptionally strong accounting of it.

Here, among many other interesting things, you've got Vivian Maier’s Florida mid-century vacation photos, Jonathan Smith’s Florida coast photos from his series East/West, Florida highway scenery from Christian Harkness, Lisa Elmaleh’s black-and-whites of the Florida Everglades (see example above), Warren Thompsons’ south Florida postcards and souvenirs, Panoramic black-and-white images of south Florida from Mario Algaze, and Florida interiors by Joelle Jensen.

Wherever or whatever Florida is, these folks make some strong visual records of it, and I feel much more like I have my head around the place.

And then there are all the regular features. Well worth your attention!

FOTOWeek DC is Upon US

2011-11-04T14:17:00.000-04:00

The attention of photography festival aficionados in the South now shifts from Atlanta to Washington, DC, where the smaller-scale but no less significant FOTOWeek DC is upon us.

FOTOWeek DC Opens tomorrow, November 5th, 2011, with a run through November 12th. The Official Launch Party is tonight, November 4th, tickets here.

FOTOWeek DC also runs competitions, the winners are listed here, and include Dallas, TX based photographer Nick Minton (image above) and Raleigh, NC based photographer Jimmy Williams, who won one of these awards last year and received an Honorable Mention this year.

The Official Program of Exhibitions is here. Among the major shows up this year for FOTOWeek DC is the show of Harry Callahan's work at the National Gallery, the Gordon Parks and the Prix Pictet Shows at the Corcoran Gallery, the Beyond Witness exhibit of photojournalism at the Pulitzer Center, and the major group shows at Zone 2.8 and Civilian Arts Projects Galleries.

The Prix Pictet show at the Corcoran seems especially significant, since Prix Pictet is a prestigious prize awarded to photographers whose work addresses social and environmental change and this is the first presentation of Prix Pictet in the United States.

This year the theme of the competition was Growth. The twelve artists featured in this show were shortlisted for this competition are Christian Als (Denmark), Edward Burtynsky (Canada), Stephanie Courturier (France), Mitch Epstein (United States), Chris Jordan (United States), Yeondoo Jung (Korea), Vera Lutter (Germany), Nyaba Leon Ouedraogo (Burkina Faso), Taryn Simon (United States), Thomas Struth (Germany), Guy Tillim (South Africa), and Michael Wolf (Germany).

The American photographer Mitch Epstein was awarded the Prix Pictet this year for his series American Power.

There is of course a Portfolio Review, and workshops, and panels, and photography projected on DC buildings after dark -- a jam-packed week of photography.

I was there last year, but won't make it this year. But I will truly miss it.

Jennifer Schwartz' Crusade in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

2011-11-04T13:21:00.001-04:00

Jennifer Schwartz' plans to tour the country developing new markets for fine art photography and selling images from the back of a Volkswagen bus is featured in today's Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Go here.

I'm now signed up through Kickstarter in this campaign to get Jennifer on the road out of Atlanta. This seems a crusade worth taking part in.

This and That -- Matt Eich, Critical Mass, Jerry Atnip, Lori Waselchuk

2011-11-03T21:12:00.002-04:00

Norfolk, VA based photographer Matt Eich is interviewed at length on Joerg Colberg's Conscientious blog, here.

Richmond, VA based photographer Susan Worsham (see image above), Austin, TX based photographer Sarah Wilson, Washington, DC based photographer Susana Raab, Atlanta, GA baased photographer Sarah Hobbs, Tacoma Park, MD, based photographer, Michelle Frankfurter, and Houston, TX based photographer Scott Dalton are among the Nifty Fifty in this year's Critical Mass competition.

Not bad representation from folks from around here. Way to go, folks.

Also, Nashville, TN based photographer Jerry Atnip is featured in a fine article, with lots of Jerry's photographs, in the current issue of Nashville Arts Magazine, here.

Finally, Philadelphia, PA based photographer Lori Waselchuk's portfolio Grace Before Dying of images made in Angola Prison in Louisiana is up at the Umbrage Gallery in Brooklyn, NY, through January 12th, 2012.

Burk Uzzel and J. Lucian Scott at Flanders Gallery

2011-11-03T13:49:00.003-04:00

Flanders Gallery, here in Raleigh, is known for its exceptionally strong photography shows. Another one is now up and will have its opening reception this Friday, November 4^th, 2011, with a reception from 6-9 in the evening.

This show features Burk Uzzle, one of North Carolina’s major photographers. Burk was born in Raleigh and after apprenticing with the Raleigh News & Observer, went to work for LIFE Magazine in 1962, at the age of 25, then had a long career with Magnum.

Burk is best known for his iconic images of the Civil Rights Movement and the Woodstock Music Festival. He now lives and photographs in Wilson, NC.

This show groups a small body of Burk’s work around issues of serial composition, images in which, for example, a line-up of young children clasping hands addresses issues of societal norms and personal pride in appearance. In other images, the natural environment and the manufactured world clash in the meet-up of a pony and rocking horse, or a Prada store sits isolated in the midst of the desert.

The other photographer featured in this show is J. Lucian Scott, born on a tobacco farm in North Carolina, who now moves between his family farm and his home in Los Angeles.

This show features work from his Welcome to the Beautiful South portfolio, images that he bases on his experience of a bucolic childhood growing up in the South and as an identical twin, both of which have greatly influenced his work.

Flanders Gallery says of this work that these “photographs merge figurative elements and classicism with the realities of his life experience, and range from portraiture to landscape and still life.”

I was not aware of Scott’s work, so I am recommending getting to this show and I am putting Scott on my list of Southern Photographers We are Getting to Know.

Call for Entries -- The Contemporary South Show, Visual Art Exchange, Raleigh, NC

2011-10-28T14:18:00.005-04:00

Readers of this blog may want to know that there is now a Call for Entries into a juried show called Contemporary South, to be up from January 6-26, 2012 at the Visual Art Exchange in Raleigh, NC.

The VAE is Raleigh's community-supported non-profit creativity incubator and gallery that supports and educates emerging, professional and student artists.

This show is a multimedia show, and very much open to photography. I would love to see photographers from parts of the South outside of central North Carolina get involved with this show.

There will be awards given, with first place receiving $500, second place receiving $250, and third place receiving $100.

All entries will be judged on the basis of jpeg submissions, which may be made either online or by CD.

Artists who are members of the VAE may submit up to two images for $10 entry fee per entry. Non-members of the VAE may also submit up to two images for $15 an entry.

The deadline for all entries to arrive at the VAE is December 1st, 2011.

For full information and online submissions, go HERE on the VAE website.

Jennifer Schwartz Goes on a Crusade

2011-10-26T16:23:00.002-04:00

Jennifer Schwartz at the Jennifer Schwartz Gallery in Atlanta is really interested in encouraging people to become art collectors, and especially collectors of photography.

To that end, she has established a program called THE TEN, with its own website. The deal is, Jennifer chooses a photographer who creates a portfolio of ten images and Jennifer offers them for $250 each.

Or, as she puts it, "The Ten is a highly curated monthly online exhibit of ten photographic images.

"The artwork you see is only available on The Ten and will never be for sale in any other location.One size, one price, one opportunity to purchase. Ever.

"Collectors are guaranteed premium, signed photographs that have true value. A new Ten collection is unveiled on the tenth of each month. The editions are relatively small (25), the price is relatively low ($250), and the collectibility is incredibly high."

Artists featured so far through THE TEN program include Lori Vrba, Mikael Kennedy, Elizabeth Fleming, Laura Griffin, and Rachel Barrett. Vrba and Griffin are Southerners, so worthy of our special attention.

OK, so that's the Story on THE TEN. But now Jennifer has decided to take the show on the road.

She is going on a crusade. She plans to get a van, paint it white, and in the spring of 2013, she will go on a ten week, ten city tour of the USA, selling her art from the back of the van and talking to people about buying original art.

To fund this, she's got a KickStarter campaign going on, and a video, also blog entries describing how the whole thing is going.

And she has talked Lori Vrba into going with her part of the way, and to donating five 8x8 signed silver gelatin prints of her image "Rebecca's Palm" to the cause as premiums for the campaign.

This is all a hoot, as we say down here, and worthy of your attention and support, if you are able.

I plan to make a pledge as I am able, and be on the lookout for a white van with Jennifer and Lori if in their travels they make it up this way.

Museum Shows of Interest to Southern Photographers

2011-10-25T10:27:00.003-04:00

Three items of interest:

1. The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC has opened (as of October 2nd) a major show of work by Harry Callahan called Harry Callahan at 100. The show is up through March 4th, 2012.

The show celebrates the 100th anniversary of Callahan's birth and includes over 100 photographs that document Callahan's long career, "from its genesis in Detroit in the early 1940s and its flowering in Chicago in the late 1940s and 1950s to its maturation in Providence and Atlanta from the 1960s through the 1990s."

"Throughout his long career," the National Gallery writes, Callahan "repeatedly found new ways of looking at and presenting the world in photographs that are elegant, visually daring, and highly experimental."

Harry Callahan is a Southern photographer by adoption, having spent a number of years toward the end of his life living and photographing in Atlanta, making a large body of work there, including the image "Ansley Park, Atlanta, (1992)" above.

More on the show here, from Artfixdaily.

2. The Turchin Center for the Visual Arts at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC, is having a show of work by John Scarlata called Living in the Light.

Scarlata was a nationally and internationally exhibited and collected photographer who was also a distinguished educator.From 1979 until 1999, he taught at Virginia Intermont College in Bristol, Virginia. From 1999 until his death in 2010, he served as the chair of the photography program at Appalachian State University.

Scarlata's work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including recent shows in Cuba and China.

This is a retrospective of Scarlata's work that was up last year at the Wellington Gray Gallery at East Carolina University in Greenville and is now up at the other end of North Carolina through January 21st, 2012.

There will be a panel discussion of Scarlata's work on November 3rd, 2011 at 7:30 in the Turchin Center featuring Jay Phyfer (Professor of photography and digital imaging, Virginia Intermont College), Gil Leebrick (Professor Emeritus and former Director of the Wellington B. Gray Gallery, East Carolina University), Pac McLaurin (PhotographyDepartment, Appalachian State University) Joe Champagne (Professor of Photography & Digital Imaging Virginia Intermont College), Jackie Leebrick, Ben Garfinkle (Oakland California) and Tom Braswell (Photographer and InterimGallery Director from Wellington B. Gray Gallery, East Carolina University).

More on the panel here.

3. The Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, SC will open a show on October 28th, 2011 called Masters in Photography, which will be up through January 8th, 2012.

The Gibbes says this show "features twentieth-century, masters of photography selected from the Gibbes permanent collection and local private collections including works by Alfred Stieglitz, Margaret Bourke-White, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Berenice Abbott, and many more."

Some Brief Notes -- Page and Dudik

2011-10-21T09:34:00.001-04:00

Two short notes on important items of interest:

1. Susan Harbage Page's powerful work on the Texas/Mexican Border is now up at the Flanders Gallery here in Raleigh, through November 1st, 2011.

We got to the opening a couple of weeks ago and met Susan and had a great talk about her work.

Here is a thoughtful review of the show, from the NCARTBlog, written by Matt Zigler.

2. Eliot Dudik's portfolio Road Ends in Water is featured on the website The Great Leap Sideways, along with an interview with Eliot.

The Great Leap Sideways started as a tumblr blog, here. But its now an online photography gallery, with lots of interesting images, including Eliot's.

Panel on Alan Cohen at the Gregg Museum

2011-10-19T16:00:00.001-04:00

A distinguished panel of photographers will discuss the work of Alan Cohen at the Gregg Museum of Art and Design, on the NC State campus, on Thursday, October 27th, 2011, at 6:00 pm.

Cohen has over 150 images up in the Gregg, in a major career retrospective for this distinguished photographer who was born in North Carolina and studied at NC State University. The show is up through December 17th, 2011.

The show is called Earth with Meaning, for Cohen in these images meditates on the contemporary world with all its scars, especially attending to places marked by history or the processes of natural events, pointing his camera downward to record the exact spots that permeate memory.

In abstracted close-ups, Cohen challenges viewers to consider the battlegrounds of World War I, the death camps of Germany, the silenced dissidents of Oaxaca, and the subtle yet significant changes reflected in the streets of Berlin before and after the Wall came down. Each of these stories is told with great simplicity and gravity through the powerful language of black and white photography.

The topic of the discussion on the 27th is Image and Meaning: Challenging History & Photography.

Panelists include a range of major figures in the world of photography.

Among them are

Brooks Jensen is co-founder, publisher and editor of the journal LensWork one of today’s most respected and important periodicals in fine art photography, and is author of the best-selling Letting Go of the Camera: Essays on Photography, and Creative Life and Single Exposures: Random Observations on Art, Photography and Creativity.

Under Jensen's leadership, LensWork Publishing has become a leader in multimedia and digital media publishing with LensWork Extended, a PDF-based, media-rich expanded version of the magazine. Jensen lives and works in Anacortes, Washington.

Mary Shannon Johnstone is Associate Professor of Art at Meredith College in Raleigh. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and MFA in photography from Rochester Institute of Technology. She is the recipient of numerous awards for her photography, including Pause, To Begin, the Critical Mass Top 50 award in both 2009 and 2010 and Honorable Mention in Lens Culture’s 2010 International Exposure Awards.

Frank Konhaus is founder and principal of KONTEK Systems, Inc. He and his wife Ellen Cassilly direct an artist residency and exhibition program at Cassilhaus, their home in Orange County. In 2006 he brought French photographer and installation artist Georges Rousse to North Carolina and became executive producer of the resulting film, Bending Space: Georges Rousse and the Durham Project. Konhaus has served on various boards and committees for the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke, is active in the Friends of Photography at the NCMA, and is a passionate collector of contemporary photography.

Tom Rankin is Director of the Center for Documentary Studies and Professor of the Practice of Art and Documentary Studies at Duke University. A native of Kentucky, his books include Sacred Space: Photographs from the Mississippi Delta (1993 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Photography); Deaf Maggie Lee Sayre: Photographs of a River Life; Faulkner's World: The Photographs of Martin J. Dain; and Local Heroes Changing America: Indivisible.

Allen Thomas, Jr. is the Business Manager of Thomas & Farris, PA, and a major collector of contemporary photography. He is the current Chair of CAM Raleigh’s Foundation Board, and a member of North Carolina Museum of Art Board of Trustees. The NCMA’s 2005 exhibition In Focus, based on photographic works Thomas had gathered, was the first show in the museum’s history created from a single collection. The 2009 inaugural exhibition at the new Taubman Museum of Art in Roanoke, VA, was Rethinking Landscape, also a solo collection show.

Burk Uzzle was born in Raleigh and just 17 when he became a staff photographer for the News & Observer. At 23 he became the youngest photographer ever hired by LIFE Magazine, and then went on to a 15 year membership in Magnum Photos, the international photographers co-operative, where he served for two years as its president before leaving in 1983. His solo museum exhibitions include the Art Institute of Chicago, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the International Center of Photography in New York. Books of his work include Landscapes, All American, Progress Report on Civilization, and A Family Named Spot.

Yours truly John N Wall, is the chair of this panel, and the usual things I say about myself are that I am a Professor of English Literature at NC State and a documentary and fine art photographer who has exhibited his work in solo and group shows across North Carolina and from Vermont to Florida and from Texas to California. I teach photography at the Raleigh Institute of Contemporary Art and write about Southern photography at www.southphotography.blogspot.com.

Come join us on the 27th!

Susan Worsham in One One Thousand

2011-10-18T18:41:00.000-04:00

Richmond, VA-based photographer Susan Worsham is the latest photographer to be featured in OneOneThousand, the e-zine of Southern photography.

Susan offers us a portfolio named By the Grace of God, made up of images Susan says were made because they were supposed to be.

This work, she says, shows us "places, and characters, that I believe, I have found through a sort of divine intervention. They are strangers, that invite me into their homes, to sit awhile and hear their stories."

So this work deals with "the hospitality of strangers, and hits on a feeling that I have sometimes when taking portraits. The feeling that I was supposed to meet a particular person, or turn down a certain road."

The title of this portfolio comes, of course, from the old saying, that I'm "American By Birth, Southern By The Grace Of God." And one feels that in these images.

One feels that the photographer is comfortable with herself and with her history as a Southerner, and with the present moment that our history has bequeathed to us and with the people we have been given as companions in this identity.

Susan presents herself in these images as one who can write that "Kudzu is now making it's way over my childhood home, covering the past like a blanket, and putting it to rest." So she looks "for the intimacy of 'home' in other places."

"Following a southern road with the slow pace of a funeral march," she writes, "this series takes me beyond the backyards and trails of my youth. It deals with the hospitality of strangers" who recognize another Southerner when they see one.

Susan looks at the South and at Southerners with clarity and integrity and clear-eyed courage.

Her work holds a sense of inevitability, that her subjects found her as much as she found them, and that the journey, and the meeting, was supposed to happen.

This is a benign form of traditional Southern fatalism, and if you are going to have that (often dubious) gift of one's Southern heritage, this is the best, and clearly the most productive, form to have it in.

Susan's vision of the South has a gravity that imparts dignity to her subjects and her locations. This is important work, very much worth your attention.

This work also demonstrates why Susan is having a fine start to her career. In 2009, she won First Place in the Texas Photographic Society's annual International Photography Competition. In 2010, she was awarded the first TMC / Kodak Film Grant, and was also an artist in residence at Light Work in Syracuse, New York. In 2011, she was named one of PDN's 30 Emerging Photographers to Watch.

Susan now has work in the Nine Visions show now up at the Danville Museum of Fine Arts and History in Danville, VA.

If you can get to Danville, make sure you have a look.

ACP -- Overwhelming!

2011-10-18T11:26:00.007-04:00

How does one take the measure of a photography festival that includes well over a hundred and fifty shows, lectures, receptions, artist's talks, and more, and more, and more?

I stumbled onto the Atlanta Celebrates Photography Festival several years ago when a professional commitment took me to Atlanta in October and I suddenly realized I was surrounded by photography. I've had work in several ACP venues over the years, but have never had the time simply to wander about and taking in the full scope of events.

So when family business took me to Atlanta last week, I jumped at the chance to take Saturday afternoon and see what I could see. But what do you do if you only have half a day to get the flavor of so vast and diverse an event?

One answer is to plan well, using the ACP Guide's listings of events by areas of Atlanta, then crank up the GPS and head out.

I specifically wanted to visit galleries where Southern photographers had work up that I had previously seen only on line. So a show called A Celebration of Photography: Six Southern Viewpoints, took me to the Art House Gallery, at 3193 Paces Ferry Place. Donna Rosser's work is there (see above), along with work by Richie Arpino, Ilia Varcev, Lila Campbell, and Diane Kirkland.

It was definitely good to see this work. I also enjoyed a long conversation with the proprietor, especially about William Eggleston, whom she knows.

My special interest in Southern photography also took me to the Emily Amy Gallery, where Stephanie Dowda has curated a show called Echoes of the Sublime, especially to see the works of Jeff Rich, who has been having an exceptionally fine year as a photographer.

Jeff's printed images -- it turns out -- are not exactly better than the same images on line, but they do have a special depth, a remarkable amount of fine detail, and a strong tactile quality when seen on the wall as a print that they don't have when seen on-screen.

Jeff shares wall space in the Emily Amy Gallery with a number of other fine photographers, including Allyson Ross of New York, John Paul Floyd of Atlanta, Klea McKenna of San Francisco, Wes Cummings of Atlanta, Justin Weaver of Atlanta, Ashley Kauschinger of Atlanta, and Megan Gorham of San Francisco.

There is a review of this show, here, from ArtsCriticATL, Atlanta's online arts journal.

The Emily Amy Gallery is in Suite 208 at 1000 Marietta Street, a funky assembly of industrial buildings that have been turned into galleries and other commercial operations, including Toscano and Sons, a first-class Italian market that has on offer delicious panini, perfect for lunch on a long day of gallery hopping.

Also at 1000 Marietta Street is the Jennifer Schwartz Gallery, which has up a couple of fine group shows, one of polaroids, featuring work by Chloe Aftel, Sol Allen, David Walter Banks, Kendrick Brinson, Amber Fouts, Grant Hamilton, Mikael Kennedy, John Reuter, and Magnus Stark. There was also a Polaroid shooter there, on Saturday, on the premises, ready to demonstrate this distinctive medium of image-making.

The other at Jennifer Schwartz Gallery is a show of Alternative Process work, including images by Keliy Anderson-Staley, David Prifti, Joni Sternbach, S. Gayle Stevens, and Curtis Wehfritz.

Of even more interest to me was the section of the gallery with small bodies of work by Southern photographers Lori Vrba, Jennifer Shaw, Lisette de Boisblanc, and Kathleen Robbins.

The Jennifer Schwartz Gallery shares space with an estimable publishing venture called Fall Line Press, which is pioneering new ways to get photography on paper and into people's hands.

Mentioning Fall Line Press, which features work by Laura Noel, reminds me that Laura has a show in this year's ACP up at the Spruill Gallery, at 4681 Ashford Dunwoody Road, in Atlanta, called Subject Matters.

Last year at ACP, Laura had flash shows up in various parts of Atlanta, part of what she called her Guerilla Photography Project. This year, Laura has taken over three rooms at the Spruill Gallery. One room contains well-seem and well-thought-out images from random, or not so random, moments in life.

The next room is papered over with what must be thousands of left-over to-do lists, over the walls and the fireplace and every available surface. I immediately felt terribly behind, wondering where I was on my current list.

On the other hand, Laura has a blog for this, her "To Do Installation Project," but there are no entries in it, so I guess its OK to be behind in one's work. Unless the empty blog is itself a part of the installation. There is, by the way, a review of this show, here, on the BurnAway site.

In any case, I then happily moved into the next room, where I found a wide range of images and objects more conceptually organized and thought out.

The art works here range from boxes of matches (I almost took one, but restrained myself, thanks to the stern warning posted near the bowls of match boxes) to photographs of buttons and pieces of candy with images on them to works like this one, in which Laura has photographed books discarded from libraries.

Laura says of this work, "These books . . . represent time and yet are inevitably destroyed by its passing. The librarian's 'Withdrawn' stamp is like a silent slap across the face. A once loved volume is ostracized from the family home."

I also made it to Jackson Fine Art for the exhibition of Sally Mann's recent work Proud Flesh, a body of work in which the subject is Mann's own husband, who is living with late-onset muscular dystrophy. This is powerful photography in which Mann uses the processes of image making to engage us with aging and illness and courage and loss and longing.

Mann's images emerge from the process of their creation marked in engaging ways. There is the subject, which is the wasting body of her husband, and the composition, which shows us this body unflinchingly, and the light, which makes these images a play of light and shadow, and the chemical process, which marks this body with its own random traces of time and change.

This is strong work, in the great tradition of religious art, in which the body is the site of meaning-making, of our efforts to come to terms with both the gift and the challenge of embodied existence.

There is a review of this show, from ArtsCriticATL, here.

I first encountered Mann's work at an earlier exhibit at Jackson Fine Art, of her Deep South portfolio. In a number of ways, her work has called me to make the American South a subject of my own work, and of this blog. I'm grateful to Mann for that, too.

And that pretty much covers my time at ACP. I missed a show I really wanted to see, with work of my friend Titus Heagins, as well as work by Allen Coonley, Builder Levy, and Marlene Lilian, at the Arnika Dawkins Gallery, but they were closed when I got there. If you go to the Anika Dawkins Gallery website, you can see images of the work I missed.

And there was still so much one could see and do. Folks in Atlanta -- and throughout the South -- are fortunate to have this annual extravaganza of photography. Next year, I'll plan a longer visit.

South x Southeast Photomagazine Volume II.1

2011-10-14T13:06:00.001-04:00

The latest issue of SouthxSoutheast Photomagazine (or SXSE, as their friends call 'em), is now out, and its a milestone issue, Volume II, a sign of survival, for October, and its here.

This issue includes kudzu and small towns and pick-up trucks, and photographs by David Simonton (see above), Rob Hann, Langdon Clay, Mike Smith, and many, many more. Just what one would want from an e-zine of Southeastern photography.

You've got to subscribe to experience it all, but its a thriving operation and one truly worthy of your support.

Southern Photography at the Ogden Museum in New Orleans

2011-10-14T12:51:00.000-04:00

The Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans has a show up now and another show opening at the end of October that are definitely of interest to Southern photographers.

The show currently up is of work by Mississippi-based photographer Briney Imes in a portfolio called Whispering Pines, a collection of black and white and color photographs taken over two decades in and around a café and bar in the Mississippi prairie.

This establishment -- and its owner and clientele -- apparently were all colorful and crusty and engaging, just the way you would want a bar to be in rural Mississippi. In this body of work, Imes documents the place and its colorful proprietor and patrons from the mid-1970s until the café closed in the early 1990s.

The show upcoming at the Ogden -- and opening October 31st -- is called Photographs from the Permanent Collection of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art.

Photographs in this show, we are told, "provide a visual narrative of the ever-changing American South – the nineteenth century, the Great Depression, the civil rights movement and the emergence of the New South" Photographers whose work is in the show include E. J. Bellocq, Walker Evans, Elliot Erwitt, William Christenberry, and, as they say, "many more."

This show is up through January 3rd, 2012, at the Ogden Museum,at 925 Camp Street, in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Jessica Ingram in One One Thousand

2011-10-10T15:57:00.001-04:00

The latest Southern photographer to be featured in One One Thousand is Nashville (and Oakland, California) based photographer Jessica Ingram. Not quite sure how Ingram conducts a bi coastal career, but the work is good, so let that pass.

Ingram's portfolio is called Waiting for a Sign, and its about one of those great Southern topics of perennial interest, the family, or, better, one's own family. They are also about the experience of leaving home, putting distance between oneself and one's past, and then seeing if Thomas Wolfe was right about going home.

Ingram, perhaps from the perspective of California, or from the perspective of the journey that has taken her from the South to California, goes home to Grandma, and to signs, and to the rituals of Southern white working class life in gardens and funerals and churches and pathways and trailer parks.

Ingram says of her images that they are about "the division and closeness that exists simultaneously between family members," and are part of an effort "to reconnect with family members I felt distanced from," but they turned out to be about separation as well, about "complex family relationships and attempts to understand the point at which individuals who are related and connected in so many ways eventually separate."

The title of the portfolio comes from a sign about signs, like Magritte's painting of a pipe that carries the reminder that this sign is not a pipe, except the image here is of a sign that says that, unlike Magritte's pipe it is what it is and, "If you are looking for a sign, here it is."

Here the overtone is of course religious, an echo of evangelical Christianity's word play with Jesus and signs. Although I've often wondered, if Jesus is the answer, what is the question. The folks who made the sign in Ingram's image were confident they knew what the question was, and what this sign is a sign of, but it's clear Ingram isn't quite so sure.

Images here treat people but also roads and signs, or as Ingram puts it, "I am interested in the spaces in between; roads I travel connecting me to members of the family, but also the space and relation of family members to one another. These spaces are so intimate and so familiar, yet often so hard to fit into."

So these images turn out to be about making images that help one "understand the history of my family," here the themes extend farther than the personal narrative. There is a greater narrative about the powerful nature of religious belief, and the rifts that can result, but also the strong pull to one another that can exist in families. There is a great expectation when a family is started, or expanded, and then eventually, there is a desire, even desperation, to hold onto what is being lost."

Images of course hold on, but distance. Granma (image at the top) here looks not at the camera but to where only she is going, quickly, across the frame, a little ahead of the photographer's attention.

Ingram here draws our attention to the making of this work as well as to the subjects she chooses to frame. There is a strongly personal flavor to this work, yet I suspect it will have strong resonance for those of us who grew up in similar Christ-haunted landscapes.

One One Thousand has edited Ingram's portfolio down to 15 images from the 25 that are on her website under the fuller name If You Are Waiting For a Sign, Here It Is. There may be a conversation here between the two versions of her portfolio. In any case, this is work worthy of our attention.

Center for Documentary Studies Announces 2011 Daylight/CDS Photo Awards

2011-10-10T09:14:00.004-04:00

Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies and Daylight Magazine partner each year to make awards for photography grounded in the documentary tradition.

This year's winners have been announced, and you can see their work up at CDS in Durham through December 22nd, at the Center for Documentary Studies,1317 W. Pettigrew Street, in Durham (directions here) and in an online story here.

There is even more of their work here.

The winner for best project is Tamas Dezsos, with Jury Picks in this category also going to Kris Vervaeke, Sebastian Liste, and John Cyr.

The winner for best Work-in-Process is David Pace, with Jury Picks in this category going to Baldomero Fernandez, James Dodd, Lydia Goldblatt, Lorenzo Martelli, and Shane Lavalette.

These folks are from all over the place (literally, with home sites ranging from NYC to Italy to Spain to Singapore), though none are actually from the American South.

The local connections, though, are several. One, that CDS is now a cultural center of sufficient renown to draw entries from all over the world to its competition.

Two, that, especially, the works of Baldomero Fernandez remind us that the rural South is now exceptionally difficult to distinguish from generic rural America.

And three, that one of the winners is Shane Lavalette, who we know is spending the year roaming our region and photographing us for the High Museum in Atlanta.

Congratulations to CDS for identifying a fine array of photographers and bringing their work to Durham.

ACP in Full Swing

2011-10-05T13:07:00.002-04:00

The annual Atlanta Celebrates Photography Festival is now in full swing, with shows up all over Atlanta and in neighboring towns in museums and galleries and restaurants, with talks and receptions, and lectures, and the portfolio review, and more, and more, and more.

To find out what's happening, there is the on-line version of the Guide, here.

There is also a preview from BurnAway Magazine, here.

There is also ACP's own FaceBook page here, and blog, here.

There are mainly lots of splendid and challenging and engaging and disturbing photographs to see. People I know either in person or through this blog have work up, like my friend Titus Heagins (image above) who has work in a show at the Arnika Dawkins Gallery called Black & White and Color, opening October 14th with a reception from 6-8 pm.

Titus also has a new website, here, so check that out, too.

I will be down for a look atACP in a couple of weeks, but in the meantime I will try to experience ACP vicariously through blogs and online versions of shows and first-person accounts that filter this way.

Keep 'em coming, folks.

Anderson Documents New Orleans in One One Thousand

2011-10-05T11:04:00.001-04:00

One One Thousand is continuing its series featuring photographers coming to terms with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, this time with a portfolio of images called One Block by Little Rock, Arkansas photographer Dave Anderson.

Anderson's portfolio is the result of his photographing in a single block of the Holy Cross section of New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward repeatedly over a period of two and a half years.

Anderson says his goal with this series was to learn, post-Katrina,"to follow both the obvious physical rebuilding of the homes as well as the evolving psychological state of the residents."

His central question in his work was posed in response to a comment by a resident of the city, who said, "You just wanna be home." Anderson wondered, "Doesn't everyone? Would they ever be? Would that thing, whatever it was, that was so uniquely New Orleans return, dissipate or transform into something completely different?

"And what about the thousands of small communities that existed within the city — would they survive, or even flourish? What was lost was clear, but what could be recovered was not at all clear."

What is clear is that Anderson offers us in this portfolio a set of strong, haunting, even haunted images. The people in them seem themselves to be haunted, by what they have been through, by what has been lost, perhaps by the struggle already required to regain a small semblance of order, of balance, of a future to look forward to.

These folks have earned our honor and respect, and Anderson's work deserves our thoughtful attention.

Hollis Bennett on the Conscientious Blog

2011-09-29T21:30:00.002-04:00

Nashville, Tennessee photographer Hollis Bennett is featured this week on Joerg Colberg's Conscientious blog, go here. This recognition is for Bennett's American Weekend portfolio

This is a real honor for Bennett, since Conscientious is an exceptionally well regarded blog and Colberg, as a result, shows up as a portfolio reviewer and commentator on contemporary photography from coast to coast and around the world.

This could lead to some really good things for Bennett.

Duke Inaugurates New MFA Program in Experimental and Documentary Arts

2011-09-29T13:37:00.000-04:00

We've got a whole slew of fine academic programs for photographers in the South, not to mention the presence of the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) in both Savannah and Atlanta, but its always good to have more opportunities.

Folks considering MFA programs might consider Duke's new one, an MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts, which just welcomed its first class of students.

Elizabeth Avedon Photographs SlowExposures 2011

2011-09-29T10:06:00.001-04:00

For those of us who couldn't make it this year, Elizabeth Avedon helps us know what we missed.

This includes Birmingham, Alabama-based photographer Vicki Hunt's first prize winning entry Seeker (see above).

Hunt's work shows a strong eye for the shapes and colors, the people and practices of Alabama. She's a photographer we are glad to get to know.

Looks like a great show, great party, great gathering of folks. See you next year!

Southern Photographers Get National Recognition

2011-09-29T09:46:00.001-04:00

Two items of interest:

1. New Orleans-based photographer Josephine Sacabo is opening a show of her work called “Óyeme con los Ojos (Hear Me With Your Eyes),” this Saturday at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, along with her friend sculptor Ersy Schwartz.

The two artists are also the subject of an appreciative feature story in today's New York Times, here.

2. Columbia, SC-based photographer Eliot Dudik (see image above) is now featured on the website LensScratch.

Eliot is also a new member of the faculty at the University of South Carolina in Columbia.

This is the university known simply as Carolina in South Carolina, but is known as South Carolina in North Carolina, because there is another institution known as Carolina in North Carolina, but as North Carolina in South Carolina.

Are we clear on that, now?

Where are the Southerners?

2011-09-22T11:56:00.002-04:00

There are two major photography shows, one up now and one about to open, that are international in scope and, given the venues, highly significant for what they say, and don't say, about perceptions in the current world of fine art photography.

The one that's up is at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, with the title Signs of a Struggle: Photography in the Wake of Postmodernism.

As the museum puts it, this exhibit "explores photographs that make reference to themselves, other media and texts, and demonstrates how such Postmodernist approaches to photography have persisted for over 30 years."

There is a review of this show on Joerg Colberg's blog Consciencious, here.

For some reason, I can't find a complete list of the photographers whose work is on display, but the show does for sure include the work of a number of well-known contemporary photographers, including Jeff Wall, Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, and about 25 other folks.

This show is up in London through the 27th of November, 2011, and seems to be part of a run-up to an even bigger show at the V&A called Postmodernism: Style and Subversion, which opens soon and will be up for a long time.

The show that is about to open is at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC, and it's the 2011 installment of MOMA's ongoing series of shows under the general heading New Photography. It opens September 28th, 2011, and will be up through January 16th of next year.

This year's show, we are promised, is expanded to include six photographers whose work demonstrates "the diversity and international scope of contemporary photographic work."

The featured photographers this year are Moyra Davey from Canada, George Georgiou from England, Viviane Sassen from the Netherlands, Zhang Dali from China, and Deana Lawson and Doug Ricard from the USA.

Congratulations are certainly in order for all these folks, and especially for Lawson and Ricard.

But my point is that, as far as I can tell, none of the photographers in either of these shows has any connections to the American South. Well, Deana Lawson (image above) did have a show of her work at Spellman College in Atlanta, in 2009, but that's pretty tenuous.

What does it mean that Southern American photographers do not seem to register in folks' minds when the questions are about recent styles in photography or current interests in work that demonstrates "diversity" or "international scope"?

Jack Spencer Workshop Coming Up in October

2011-09-20T15:25:00.000-04:00

Distinguished Southern photographer Jack Spencer is offering a rare opportunity to learn from him on-site and in his studio with his first-ever workshop the weekend of October 14-16, in Nashville, Tennessee.

The brochure for this show is here, with lots more information about time, place, staff, and what you need to bring.

We've discussed Jack's work before on this blog, when he had a major show at the Rebekah Jacob Gallery in Charleston last year.

We noticed his splendid engagement with light, color, and form, and we said that "Jack's mastery of light and color in these images makes for haunting, powerful landscapes that draw the viewer in, deeper and deeper, into Southern landscapes of field and forest, of dirt roads that lead the eye back into the woods where sunlight plays across clearings, of marshlands and seascapes and rolling hills."

I wish I could make it to Nashville in October, and I recommend that you do just that, if you can. This looks like a real treat.

Openings!

2011-09-16T11:06:00.001-04:00

With the morning chill in the air in my part of the South, its clear that Summer 2011 is behind us, and a new season is before us. And there is so much going on, wherever you are in the South this Friday.

If you are in Danville, VA, there is the Nine Visions show (see previous post).

Further South, Raleigh-based photographer Larry Earley is having a show of his elegantly seen and beautifully printed images documenting changes in Southern coastal life as traditional cultures give way to the world of tourism and mass production. The show, called East of Beaufort, opening tonight, September 16th, with a reception between 6-9 at the Through This Lens Gallery, at 303 East Chapel Hill Street, in in downtown Durham, NC.

Larry is a master of traditional, hand-made darkroom photographs, a practitioner of the craft as well as the art of photography. This is definitely worth checking out, if you are in this part of the South.

If you are in Georgia, on the other hand, this is the night to check out all the events of Opening Weekend for SlowExposures 2011. There is much to to do -- the SlowExposures show, Mr Bennette's show, David Simonton's show, the Party, the Ball, the portfolio review, Sylvia Plachy's lunch, and much, much more.

Nine Southern Photographers at the Danville Museum of Fine Arts and History

2011-09-16T09:38:00.000-04:00

The Danville Museum of Fine Arts and History in Danville, VA, is opening a major show of photographs today, Friday, September 16th. The show is called Nine Visions,and includes the work of nine Southern photographers who together reflect several generations of fine art photography in the American South.

Work in this show includes images made by two generations of the Gowin family, both Emmet Gowin and his son Elijah Gowin, as well as work by Bill Wylie, Tom Rankin, Jeff Whetstone, Dave Woody, Susan Worsham, Pamela Pecchio, and Chris Sims.

The show is up through November 13, 2011.

The grand master here is Emmet Gowin, a native of Virginia who has had a long and distinguished career as a fine art photographer. Its good to see that his son has gone into the family business.

Other photographers represented in this show are also based in what one might call the "northern South," the South of Virginia and North Carolina. Susan Worsham, Bill Wylie, Dave Woody, and Pamela Pecchio all live in Virginia; indeed, Bill, Dave, and Pamela all teach at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

Jeff Whetstone and Chris Sims live and work in North Carolina; Jeff teaches at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and Chris Sims teaches at Duke University in Durham and is on the staff of the Center for Documentary Studies.

Many of these photographers are folks whose work we are familiar with on this blog. Some are new, and well worthy of being more widely known. I'm delighted to see them all together in one place.

The curators of the show in Danville want us to think of these photographers especially as Southerners (we are told these "photographers use their southern sensibilities as they look at the people and folkways of the South"). We are also to see them as representing "what is currently going on in photography at the university/academic level."

While that's true, mostly, (Susan Worsham does not, I think, teach photography in an academic setting, but I hope she will correct me if I am wrong), thinking of this work in this way doesn't quite get it, and in fact misses something distinctive about the role of universities in the American South.

Thinking like this makes a divide between "the university/academic level" on the one hand and some other unspecified level on the other hand, in the larger realm of cultural production.

But universities in the South have carried a larger role as centers for creativity, reflection, and culture -- and for the nurture and support of the arts in their surrounding communities -- than they have, perhaps, in other parts of the country.

Universities in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco, for example, have a place in a much larger urban area, and are in cultural terms almost secondary to a much larger, thriving, lively arts community, a museum and gallery world, a world of creative response that is largely independent of, and sometimes hostile to, whatever makes an academic institution "academic."

The South has been, until recently, a largely rural and small town world, in relationship to which its universities were places where culture was studied but also produced, and to which artists working in the small towns and rural areas looked for support, recognition, and validation. Places like Atlanta are only now becoming large enough and culturally rich enough to support and sustain a cultural and artistic community independent of their institutions of higher learning.

In that context, in the South, so often our artists are our teachers, in both the academic (perhaps in the descriptive and analytical sense, that a phrase like "academic objectivity" might imply) and also in a more engaged and visionary sense, as people who teach us how to see, or what it is that we are seeing and not noticing, or seeing and can engage with more deeply.

So, this show is definitely about current Southern photographic visions and sensibilities. It is vastly more significant for us than the label of "academic" might imply. It looks splendid, and well worth a trip to Danville.

Russell Lord Named Curator of Photographs at the New Orleans Museum of Art

2011-09-14T10:43:00.001-04:00

Russell Lord has been named as the Freeman Family Curator of Photographs at the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA). Lord is a historian, curator, and educator who recently completed a Jane and Morgan Whitney fellowship in the Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He will assume his new position on October 17, 2011.

NOMA has been a pioneer in collecting photographs and now holds over 8,500 works representing the history of fine art photography and including work by Berenice Abbott, Ansel Adams, Diane Arbus, Ilse Bing, William Eggleston, and Edward Steichen.

In his new role, Lord will be responsible for the care, interpretation, and presentation of NOMA's wide-ranging photography holdings. In addition to developing exhibition programming that expands scholarship in photography and actively engages audiences, Lord will continue to acquire works that enrich the museum's collection.

"We are proud to welcome Russell Lord to NOMA and New Orleans," said Director Susan Taylor. "His interest in and study of the relationships between photography, other artistic media, and modern life are a perfect match for the museum's mission of combining scholarship with accessibility and engaging a broad range of audiences with new and exciting exhibitions, publications, and public programs."

Lord began his career as Curatorial Assistant in the Prints, Drawings, and Photographs Department at the Yale University Art Gallery. During his course work at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, Lord also served as Gallery Director at New York's Hans P. Kraus, Jr. Fine Photographs.

Alan Cohen at the Gregg Museum of Art and Design

2011-09-14T10:07:00.003-04:00

Chicago-based photographer Alan Cohen is having a major retrospective show of his work, called Earth with Meaning: The Photographs of Alan Cohen, now up at the Gregg Museum of Art and Design in Raleigh, NC, through December 17, 2011.

The show will open formally with a reception on September 22, with a reception from 6-8 pm in the Gregg Museum, which is located in the Talley Student Center on the campus of NC State University.

Cohen is a graduate of NC State with a degree in nuclear engineering. He discovered photography while in graduate school in Chicago and earned an M.Sc.degree in 1972 from the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he studied with Aaron Siskind, Arthur Siegel, Garry Winogrand, Charles Swedlund, Ken Josephson, and Joe Jachna.

Cohen's work is included in the permanent collections of museums across the country, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta GA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Cohen is now Adjunct Full Professor in the Art History, Theory, Criticism Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a member of the visiting faculty at Columbia College Chicago's Department Of Photography.

Cohen's work combines the documentary and conceptual traditions of photographic practice to engage place, event, and trace, working in places where the fragmentary physical remnants of historical and natural events are still visible, including vestiges of the Berlin Wall, remains of Holocaust sites, boundary lines, meteor impact craters, ruins of fortresses, and abandoned colonial buildings.

Cohen says he seeks in his work to record “the earth of our past as a record of memory, not as an act of witness.”

There will also be a panel discussion of Cohen's work, chaired by yours truly, on October 27th, at 6:00 pm in the Gregg Museum. The distinguished panel will include Brooks Jensen, editor of Lens Work Magazine; Tom Rankin, Director of Duke's Center for Documentary Studies; Shannon Johnstone, Associate Professor of Photography at Meredith College; and Frank Konhaus, a Durham-based photographer and audiovisual design executive.

Responders to the Panel Discussion include members of the photography collective of Wilson, NC: the distinguished photographer Burk Uzzle (whose career includes working for LIFE and serving as president of Magnum) and the distinguished photography collector and curator Allen Thomas.

Catching Up: Early Fall Edition

2011-09-13T11:03:00.002-04:00

Still loads of good things happening this fall for photographers and photography in the South.

Here are three more items of interest:

1. One One Thousand features for early fall the New Orleans photography Jennifer Shaw and her Hurricane Story project.

We've discussed this portfolio by Shaw earlier on this blog so we won't dwell on her work further, except to say it's good to see her work in One One Thousand.

Her images look just as good in this venue as they do in the book.

Maybe better, actually -- the jewel tones in these images look great when printed on paper in book format, but they take on a luminescent quality when backlighted on a computer screen that truly enriches the viewing experience and thus the impact of these haunting images.

2. Distinguished photography blogger Joerg Colberg. master of the Conscientious blog, is now featuring the intriguing work of Atlanta-based photographer Julie Sims from her Uncharted Territory portfolio, work she showed this year at the Castell Photography Gallery in Asheville, NC.

Sims' work is about trying to come to terms with the experience of mental illness by externalizing it through drawing parallels between disruptions of the inner world of the mind and external disruptions caused by natural disasters in the world around us.

Sims' images show "constructed settings" that "reference both the natural world, and the anatomical structures and chemical pathways of the brain."

She says, "The devastation of a home disrupts our ability to carry on with life as usual, and replaces an assumed security with the helpless feeling of being controlled by unseen forces. Our psychological environment is similarly subject to fault lines and erosive conditions."

Her work seeks to offer "a different context in which to consider mental health issues, and reminds us that systems of the mind and body are as interdependent as we are with the environment in which we live."

3. The September issue of SouthxSoutheast is out now on their website, http://sxsemagazine.com/, with loads of articles, essays, and other kinds of features on the general topic of music in Southern culture.

There is 'way too much good stuff here to try to summarize, and you need to put down (a very modest) subscription fee to get to it, so I want go into much detail.

Just a taste, however:

Photographers featured include William Eggleston (photographing Graceland), Jimmy Williams (photographing Blues musicians), Larry Fink (photographing the music scene post-Katrina in New Orleans), Briney Imes (photographing small clubs in Mississippi), and much, much more.

Especially interesting is the portfolio assembled by John Bennette of Gospel musicians at work.

SxSE is well worth the price of admission. Check it out!

Southern Cooking . . . . .

2011-09-12T16:34:00.002-04:00

Good to see that Southern cooking is getting its due recognition, and not just in William Eggleston's photography (see above).

This month's Bon Appetit magazine declares Charleston's HUSK as the #1 Best New Restaurant in America for 2011.

The same issue features recipes from Raleigh's own Ashley Christensen and her restaurant Poole's Diner for a Down-Home Sunday Supper of roasted chicken, creamy grits, and fig and thyme jam.

To round out this issue's interest in Southern cooking is Bon Appetit's listing of Bill Neal's Southern Cooking as one of the classic cookbooks of all time.

Bill Neal got us into this. He started a restaurant in Chapel Hill, NC, called Crooks Corner that featured traditional Southern food taken to a new level of refinement and distinction.

After Crooks Corner came Charleston's Hominy Grill and Atlanta's Watershed, and now there is a lengthy and ever-growing list of fine dining establishments across the South that are grounded in the Southern culinary tradition.

The current national interest in local food well-prepared fits our dining traditions perfectly.

What's this got to do with photography? Well, if an interest in Southern cooking is good enough for William Eggleston, its good enough for me.

After all, cooking is an art, like photography. A shooter's got to eat, and might as well eat well.

Meditation on Photography and 9/11 from the Guardian Newspaper

2011-09-08T10:42:00.006-04:00

England's Guardian newspaper has put together a splendid visual/audio piece for the upcoming anniversary of 9/11.

Go here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2011/sep/08/9-11-attacks-photographs-interactive

Its a powerful and haunting meditation on, and example of, the power of photography.

I think its worthy of our contemplation as we consider photography's role in recording, documenting, and interpreting time, history, and experience of a specific place.

And, after all, the Pentagon is in Virginia.

Get out Your Dancing Shoes . . . . .

2011-09-08T09:48:00.000-04:00

Opening of this year's SlowExposures Show grows ever nearer. So the SlowExposures Show Committee is inviting us all to a Ball.

This is an occasion not to be missed. Remember your small town Southern high school prom, when you were taking photographs of the merrymakers rather than dancing with the Prom King or Queen?

Adulthood is the time for the revenge of the artsy, the geeks, the nerds, and the oddballs, and the SlowExposures Show Committee is helping us with that.

Here's how they put it:

Don't miss out on your ticket to The SlowExposures Ball! Deadline for Tickets is Friday, September 9th.

THE 9TH ANNUAL SLOWEXPOSURES BALL is Saturday, September 17th and we don't want to miss you!

This year, we have moved the Ball back to Opening Weekend of SlowExposures so our jurors and guests from all across the U.S. can put on their dancing shoes and join us. It turned out to be a great move--many of the photographers whose work graces the walls next door to the Ball will also be here.

About the only one who cannot attend this year is the mule who traditionally takes ball-goers on carriage rides (he has the night off...)

Come at 7:00 p.m. to Strickland's in Concord for cocktails...dinner is announced at 8:00...dancing to the sounds of The Regal Brothers, a jazz trio featuring jazz and swing standards.

As usual, we will have our local photography studio offering instant "prom photos" for a nominal fee.

And then there are the photographs...the Ballroom is adjacent to the Main Exhibition where many of the images will feature this-night-only prices. It's a great opportunity to meet many of the photographers who are coming from California, New Mexico, New York, Texas and all points between. Take a chance on our traditional Picture Raffle and win a lovely photograph for $1. Check out some of the work that will be shown by the participants of the SlowExposures Portfolio Review.

It's a black tie-optional event with a fun, rural side. It's the only formal ball where every table is encouraged to bring a cooler! Each table of eight will create a centerpiece and a signature cocktail that will be judged by a mystery panel of judges. And, thanks to Still Pond Vineyards for getting everyone started with award-winning, complementary red and white wine.

The cost: $50.00 a ticket. The good deed: It's a benefit for The Whiskey Bonding Barn. The pay-off: A night of fun, dancing, conversation with photography lovers, awesome images, and unforgettable memories.

HOW TO PURCHASE TICKETS

BY PHONE or E-MAIL: Call 770-567-3600 and leave a message--we'll get back to you pronto. Or, email us at billchrisfarm@hughes.net with your inquiry.

ON-LINE BY CREDIT CARD: Go to www.whiskeybondingbarn.com. Go to the History page and use the handy PayPal donation button to charge your tickets.

(Please be sure to tell us who you are so we can do the place cards.)

ACP Festival 2011 Guide now Available Online . . .

2011-09-08T09:29:00.000-04:00

Go here for a full listing of exhibits, events, and other activities that are part of this year's Atlanta Celebrates Photography Festival.

http://festivalguide.acpinfo.org/listings/index/year:2011

A number of the exhibits that are part of this year's ACP are already up and available for viewing, including Atlanta photographer Santiago Vanegas' show of large images he made in Antarctica (see above) now on display in the Transportation Mall at the Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson Airport, where they will be seen daily by millions.

Every time I think about the Atlanta airport, I remember the old saying -- on the Day of Judgment, regardless of your final destination, you will have to change planes in Atlanta.

Chip Simone at the High Museum

2011-09-04T10:42:00.002-04:00

Atlanta-based photographer Chip Simone has a major show of work now up at the High Museum, through November 6th, 2011, entitled The Resonant Image.

A native of Worcester, MA, Simone studied at the Rhode Island School of Design with Harry Callahan. Soon after, he moved to Atlanta, where he made a career as a photographer by making B&W street photographs.

Chip Simone's photographs are in the permanent collections of the High Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art in NYC, The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, The Houston Museum of Fine Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, The Worcester (Mass.) Historical Museum, and the Sir Elton John Collection.

In 1996, Simone published On Common Ground, Photographs from the Crossroads of the New South with a forward by former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young.

More recently, he has moved into color photography. The show at the High contains over 60 of his color photographs, like the one above, documenting and celebrating the past decade of his work.

Simone says, "My pictures celebrate the very act of seeing. . . . . . The potential of photography lies in its ability to render with a clarity and eloquence that bestows gravity to common objects and invests moments in time with a significance that transcends time. It is not what the photographer sees, but rather how the photographer sees that breathes life into a photograph."

Simone has convincingly mastered the transition from seeing in B&W to seeing in color. There is still very much a street photographer aesthetic in this work, yet color enhances form, composition, and timing in these images.

Simone's exhibit is a must-see for folks in Atlanta or those going to Georgia for ACP. Very much worth checking out!

Things to Come, Part Three -- More Shows to Watch Out For This Fall

2011-09-03T14:46:00.005-04:00

Three more items of interest:

1. Shelby Lee Adams will have a show of his photographs from the salt & truth portfolio, opening September 9th and up through October 9th, 2011, at the Davis Orton Gallery, at 114 Warren Street, in Hudson, NY.

This show is in conjunction with the publication of Adams' monograph salt & truth by Candela Books in October 2011.

It will be interesting to see what the folks in Hudson, NY, make of Adams' images.

2. Durham, NC-based photographer Christopher Sims is having a show of work from his portfolio Theater of War: The Pretend Villages of Iraq and Afghanistan at the Southeast Museum of Photography, 1200 West International Speedway Boulevard, in Daytona Beach, FL, up now through October 2nd.

3. Savannah-based photographer Jeff Rich continues to have a year to remember. He will be showing work from his Watershed portfolio in several venues early this fall.

He will be in the No Place in Particular: Images of the American Landscape show, up at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Jacksonville from September 7th until November 6th.

This show also includes work by Jeremiah Ariaz, Bryon Darby, Matt Siber, Steven B. Smith, Amy Stein, Michael Vahrenwald and Scott Wheeler.

He will also have work in the Echoes of the Sublime a show at Emily Amy Gallery, at 1000 Marietta Street, Suite 208, in Atlanta, GA, from September 9 – October 22.

The show will also include work by the following artists: Allyson Ross, John Paul Floyd, Klea McKenna, Wes Cummings, Justin Weaver, Aaron Norberg, Lauren Hughes, Ryan Hendon, Ashley Kauschinger and Megan Gorham.

Jeff will also have a solo exhibition of his work at Virginia Intermont College, in Bristol, Virginia. The exhibition will feature work from the French Broad and Tennessee chapters of Watershed and will be up from September 15th to October 13th in the Anne R. Worrell Fine Arts Center.

Jeff will deliver a lecture “The Evolution of Watershed” as part of this exhibition on September 19, 201 at 7:30 p.m. in Nunn Recital Hall. This lecture is open to the public.

Sally Mann Show at Jackson Fine Art

2011-09-01T09:39:00.003-04:00

Sally Mann will have a show of her photographs at Atlanta's Jackson Fine Art Gallery, at 3115 East Shadowlawn Avenue, opening Friday, September 9th, 2011 and up through Saturday, October 29th.

This show will offer images from Mann's Proud Flesh portfolio, a richly envisioned meditation on the aging body, especially of Mann's husband. Work from other portfolios by Mann will be on view as well.

This show opens with a reception from 6-9 pm on September 9th, to be attended by Mann.

This is a not-to-be-missed show. Mann is doing exceptional work. And the venue is a fine place to see it.

I remember my first visit to Jackson Fine Art, an unassuming white house in a residential neighborhood of Atlanta.

I had to wonder, from the outside, what there could be to see in the inside. But once inside, one finds that the modest building turns out to have wings and additions that provide exceptional amounts of space for viewing photographs.

The staff is gracious and thoroughly professional, exuding authentic Southern hospitality.

The work up that day was an earlier show of Mann's work, her large photographs of Southern landscapes. I was enthralled with her work, and have remained so, and the gallery space showed it splendidly.

You gotta check this out, if you are in Atlanta.

Southern Photographers in Critical Mass

2011-08-30T09:56:00.001-04:00

The folks who run Critical Mass, the photography talent search run annually by Photo Lucida, have announced the Finalists for 2011.

Go HERE for the complete list.

Good to see some familiar Southern names among the Finalists, including Hollis Bennett (see image above), Lori Vrba, and Susan Worsham.

If I missed you, or someone you know who qualifies as a Southern photographer, please let me know so I can keep track.

Things to Come, Part Two -- More Shows To Watch Out For in Fall 2011

2011-08-29T10:08:00.002-04:00

More Announcements of Forthcoming Photography Shows in the South

Kathleen Robbins will open a show of her images from the Mississippi Delta from her Into the Flatland portfolio on September 6th at the Beard + Riser Studios, at 201 Main Street, in Greenwood, Mississippi. Robbins' images have an elegance and richness that both complements and scrutinizes the Mississippi landscape. If you are in this part of Mississippi, this is a can't miss kind of show.

Eliot Dudik will open a show of his landscape photographs at a gallery called Art + Cayce, at1329 State Street, in Cayce, SC, on September 9th. The gallery calls his images "bucolic," though I'm not sure someone who offers us a photograph of a lake filled with large truck tires a "bucolic" photographer. First-class photographer, yes; photographer attuned to the ironies of Southern rural life, yes; bucolic, well, maybe.

Jennifer Schwartz Gallery in Atlanta is opening a show of landscape photography on September 10th, including work by several Southern photographers, including William Boling, Debbie Flemming Caffery, Susan Hadorn, Tom Rankin, and Kathleen Robbins.

Laura Noel is opening a major show of new work called Subject Matters: Laura Noel New Work, with an opening reception Thursday, September 15th from 6 until 9 pm at the Spruill Gallery in Atlanta's Spruill Arts Center, at 4681 Ashford Dunwoody Road, in Atlanta, GA.

Part of this show will be an installation of To-Do lists, and Laura is asking for contributions. She needs 1,100 lists and has only 800+ at the moment. So, if you want to be part of Laura's show, send her your old To-Do list to Laura Noel, c/o Visual Arts Department & Gallery, Emory University, 700 Peavine Creek Drive, Atlanta, GA 30322.

And of course, SlowExposures is also about to open in Concord, GA, south of Atlanta, on September 16th, at 1:00 pm, in the R. F. Strickland Building. Events run through September 25th.

The opening of SlowExposures includes an expanding array of festive events, including a big Soiree on Friday night, September 16th, a portfolio review on Saturday the 17th, the SlowExposures Ball on Saturday night, and lunch with Sylvia Plachy on Sunday the 18th.

For a list of this year's photographers in the SlowExposures show, go HERE.

There will also be the second in the series of John Bennette’s curated shows on the theme "southern Memories," up at the Whiskey Bonding Barn, also opening on September 16th, and this year featuring work, chiefly portraits, by Dave Anderson, Paul Conlan, Malgorzata Florkowska, Gary Gruby, Jessica Hines, Sarah Hoskins, Jane Robbins Kerr, Joanna Knox, Kendall Messick, Donna Rosser, Jerry Siegel, Marilyn Suriani, Jo Lynn Still, and Hai Zhang.

Raleigh's own David Simonton will be a featured artist this year at SlowExposures with his own show at
A Novel Experience Bookstore, on the square in Zebulon, GA.

SlowExposures brings us closer to the Daddy Rabbit of Southern photography festivals, Atlanta Celebrates Photography, opening in Atlanta on October 1st. Much more about ACP later.

In the meantime, much great work to see, pretty much wherever you are in the South this fall.

Deborah Luster in One One Thousand

2011-08-26T14:44:00.003-04:00

New Orleans-based photographer Deborah Luster is the latest artist to be featured in the on-line ezine One One Thousand, with a selection of photographs from her Tooth for an Eye portfolio.

Luster's images in this portfolio are of empty lots, railroad trestles, barren bedrooms, alleyways, and drainage ditches. The images seem to have disparate subjects, but they are linked by the fact that they all document places where people have died, and died violently.

Luster is best known for her portfolio One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana, images made in several of Louisiana's prisons, including the infamous Angola Prison. These images present people cut off from society for long prison terms, often for violent crimes.

Luster's work in prisons is about making connections, about establishing a sense of presence, seeking to affirm a common humanity between those inside the prison and those of us outside the prison. One way she does that is to print images of prisoners on sheets of metal and coat them so that the images of those remote from us can be touched and handled.

Luster now turns to absence, to places where murders have occurred, leaving whatever traces of violence might survive the removal of the victim's body. Her goal is to document "contemporary and historical homicide sites in the city of New Orleans and is, as well, an exploration of the empty, dizzying space at the core of violence."

These images are all long exposures; movement leaves its traces in these images, even as these spaces seem imprinted with the force of the violence that has taken place here. All the images in this portfolio are circular in format; one might imagine them glimpses of the last things someone being murdered might have seen before he died.

She also finds that as she works the city itself is changing, so her work also documents "physical loss" as New Orleans' "unique material culture crumbles and transforms following generations of political failure."

Luster continues to mature and develop as an artist. There is much fine work here to contemplate. In addition to the thoughts one might have about New Orleans and about American society, one might also consider once more the nature of photography as a creative act.

Things to Come, Part One -- Susan Harbage Page at Flanders Gallery

2011-08-25T16:10:00.004-04:00

Yes, the days are getting shorter, temperatures have moderated a bit, and there is a hint of autumn cool in the early morning air. That must mean that the fall exhibition season will soon be upon us. Indeed, the announcements of upcoming shows are beginning to to appear and include a number of photographers familiar to readers of this blog.

Susan Harbage Page will have a show of work from her Border Project portfolio opening October 1st at the Flanders Gallery in Raleigh, NC, including the image above. Page records traces in her work, traces of the Great Northward Migration of people from Central and South America into the United States. These images document small events but evoke powerfully the larger events that leave behind these traces.

The space of exhibition is often important in our experience of art. Page showed some of this work earlier this year in the large atrium of a university building, in which the images themselves served as reminders that central North Carolina is one of the major destinations for people crossing the Mexico-USA border.

One could look at Page's image of a shirt, a shoe, an ID bracelet end then look through the building's windows at a landscape in which much of the manual labor maintaining that landscape was itself a sign, or a trace, of the movement of people Page is following.

I'm going to be interested in seeing this work again inside a more conventional exhibition space, a gallery of gracious and generous spaces, but one without windows, one that is part of the commercial world of art, a world whose patrons are supported in their affluence by the labor of the people who left behind the traces that Page records in her work. There is potential here for transformative encounters.

Flanders Gallery actually has up another photography show, right now, a really interesting show of contemporary landscape photography, but the shooters are not, as we say, from around here. Though they are fine shooters, and are Alberto Borea, LaToya Ruby Frazier , Greg Lindquist , Mary Mattingly , Cameron Martin, Ellen Phelan,and Xaviera Simmons.

Becoming: Questions of Identity at the Nasher

2011-08-18T15:59:00.001-04:00

The Nasher Museum at Duke University has opened a major show of photographs now up through January 8th, 2012, called Becoming: Photographs From The Wedge Collection.

The official opening is September 14th. The show is a joint project of the Nasher Musuem and the Wedge Collection. The show was curated by The Wedge Curatorial Projects’ Director Kenneth Montague.

This exhibition brings together over a hundred photographs by more than 60 artists from Canada, the United States, Africa and throughout the African Diaspora. The show's title and organizing theme are taken from the writings of Stuart Hall, in his Cultural Identity and Diaspora (1990). Hall argues that "Cultural identity is a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as ‘being’. It belongs to the future as much as to the past… identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narrative of the past"

The goal of the exhibition is to explore the relationship between what the curators call "configurations of identity" and the practice of portrait photography in the last half-century.

Or, as the show's curator puts it, "Whether these images document an era or reflect on family histories, this compelling exhibition provides a vivid testimony to the increasing presence of artists who chose to reject the common tendency to view black communities in terms of conflict or stereotype.

"Becoming offers a fresh exploration of the strength, beauty and complexity captured within representations of black life as it is both lived and imagined. Providing insights into the changing roles of the artist and subject, the camera is used to create scenes that vary from everyday realism to a staged universe. Some images have the look and feel of snapshots, while others convey a theatrical or cinematic positioning. Other works explore the conventions of the family portrait and family album within the dynamics of domestic space and implied perceptions of visuality and body politics."

Photographers whose work is in the show include Henry Clay Anderson, Michele D. Arthur, James Barnor, Janette Beckman, Dawoud Bey, Deanna Bowen, Vanley Burke, Clement Cooper, Wiliam Cordova, Pete Doherty, Calvin Dondo, Alfredo Ramos Fernández and Katarzyna (Kasia) Badach, Tony Gleaton, Joy Gregory, Fred Herzog, Pieter Hugo, Ayana Jackson, Rashid Johnson, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Seydou Keita, Deana Lawson, Christna Leslie, Oumar Ly, Danny Lyon, Brendan Meadows, Sabelo Mlangeni, Anna Möller, Megan Morgan, Dennis Morris, Zanele Muholi, Keith Ng, Peggy Nolan, Stephanie Noritz, J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere, Horace Ové, Dawit Petros, Charlie Phillips, Annabel Reyes, Milton Rogovin, Athi-Patra Ruga, Wayne Salmon, Vivian Sassen, Jürgen Schadeberg, Jamel Shabazz, Malick Sidibé, Xaviera Simmons, Aaron Siskind, Mikhael Subotzky, Hank Willis Thomas, Mickalene Thomas, James VanDerZee, Camilo José Vergara, Cecil Norman Ward, Ian Watson, Carrie Mae Weems, and Simon Willms.

That's a stunning list of photographers. For a small selection of the work in the show, go HERE for the Nasher's account and HERE for the Wedge Collection's selections.

This promises to be a major assemblage of outstanding work, well worth your travel to Durham.

Jennifer Shaw's Hurricane Story

2011-08-15T12:03:00.000-04:00

Shooting powerfully emotional events with a camera is often a complex performance, because the act of photographing has built into it a process of distancing, of stepping back from the events themselves. One of the ironies of photography as an art form is this dance between the illusion of presence and the distancing that makes the image possible.

We understand something of what it was like to "be there" because the photographer has stepped into a situation with a camera and yet stepped back from it in the act of making the image, so that the event is transformed from lived 3-dimensional reality into a two dimensional image on a gallery wall or on the pages of a book or in the dancing electrons of a computer monitor.

Usually, the photographer replicates our outsider role in such situations, someone coming into the situation to be a witness to it and to record it so that we can "be there," too, in the strange way a photograph places us before an event.

But sometimes the photographer is not an outsider, but an insider, a person caught up in the event itself, with powerful consequences for the person. The question then is, where and how does one find the distance on the experience to make sense of it, or at least to make art of it, when the events are crashing around the photographer, threatening to overwhelm the place that is the place of refuge from which one works.

New Orleans-based photographer Jennifer Shaw usually makes shots of Mardi Gras and the other wonders of New Orleans with her Holga camera and prints them up in B&W, incorporating split-toning in the process to heighten the moody and romantic character of the place and the people.

Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans when Shaw was nine months pregnant. She and her husband left the city early on August 28th, 2005, in a truck, as she says, "loaded up . . . two cats, two dogs, two crates full of negatives, all our important papers and a few changes of clothes." They fled to a motel in southern Alabama; the next day, New Orleans was flooded and their son was born.

Their journey home took them two months and 6000 miles of driving. What they came home to was, of course, the well-documented experience of a devastated city.New parenthood is enough of a disturbance to one's world; simply put, all the twos in Shaw's account of their departure -- two people, two cats, two dogs, two crates -- now had to accommodate a third figure. For Shaw and her husband, all the change was magnified many-fold by the effects of the storm.

Post-Katrina New Orleans has attracted lots of photographers, not to mention movie makers like Spike Lee and the TV crews of Treme. It has joined Detroit as as the place to go to document urban ruin and the anguish that goes along with it. Most of them, however, have been in the conventional photographer's position of outsider coming in, with the goal of taking us there with them.

What Shaw has done is to use her camera to make work out of her experience as an insider. She's still shooting with her Holga, but she has shifted to color film, and to photographing not the surfaces of New Orleans' devastation, but groupings of dolls and toys.

I don't generally like images that depict scenes manufactured out of sets and toy figures, but in Shaw's images this strategy works powerfully and evocatively. Here, this approach is not just a game of perspective and personification. Shaw's decision to do this project with toys enables her to externalize in her images complex experiences of fear, dread, disorientation, and recovery even as the familiar world of home ceases to be a place of respite but a constant source of challenge.

The images in this body of work are playful and eerie, menacing and reassuring. disturbing and mundane. They are honest, truthful, hopeful, and engaging. They are about endings and new beginnings, about the loss of the familiar and the restoration of order. Having seen them, I feel I now know about the experience of Katrina not just in terms of broken surfaces but in terms of one person's experience from within.

And you can have them as they came to me, in a well-produced volume, with an introduction by Rob Walker, called Hurricane Story, from Broken Levee Books and Chin Music Press. This is fine work, well worth a look.

Diana Bloomfield at Tilt Gallery

2011-08-12T11:26:00.002-04:00

Raleigh-based photographer Diana Bloomfield is having a show of her alternative process work at the Tilt Gallery, at 919 West Fillmore Street, in Phoenix, AZ, opening September 2nd and up through September 30th, 2011.

Diana is a long-time specialist in traditional and alternative process work. She is a master of pinhole photography and of printing using gum bichromate, platinum/palladium; and cyanotype processing.

Diana often combines multiple alternative processes in the production of a single image, mixing color with black & white and toned printing or printing a cyanotype over platinum, gum over platinum/palladium, or platinum over pigment.

Diana has exhibited her images across the country and around the world, including a major exhibition in China in 2006. Her work is in the permanent collections of Princeton University, NC State University, and the City Museum of Raleigh. Her images have been featured in books and articles on alternative printing processes. She has taught printing at Philadelphia's Project Basho as well as locally at NC State University and at Duke's Center for Documentary Studies.

Diana is a long-time exhibiting artist with Tilt Gallery, one of a number of artists specializing in traditional and alternative processes who have helped make Tilt Gallery a national and world center for this form of photographic practice.

In this digital age, images often come to us with the illusion of transparency and of clarity of sight that conceals for the viewer the work of making. Darkroom work itself seems a specialized craft and traditional and alternative process work, which takes the darkroom to a new level of creativity, has become an elite practice among fine art photographers.

Alternative process work calls attention to the process of image-making and adds to the experience of looking at a photograph elements of texture, experiences of obscuring as well as revealing, invitations to consider the act of seeing itself as a practice rather than a given of experience. It shatters the illusion that visual experience comes to us unmediated, that photography brings us the world as it is rather than as it is seen.

One special feature of alternative process photographs is often their tactile feel and physical three-dimensionality. Paper and chemicals join with image to make an object with depth and texture, unlike inkjet images where the surface that holds the image is so thin as to seem to want to disappear.

Southerners live in a very physical world, a world we constantly remake as one cost of living with our history. Diana's work reminds us of the texture, the physicality, the constructedness of that world. She does compelling, provocative work, well worth seeing, if you are in Phoenix in September.

The Dog Days of 2011 -- Catching Up

2011-08-11T15:22:00.000-04:00

Four items of interest, mostly about things happening that are based in North Carolina:

1. Chapel Hill, NC-based (and previously featured on this blog) photographer Lori Vrba is the current featured artist for Atlanta's Jennifer Schwartz Gallery's program THE TEN, which features each month ten images by a designated photographer, all for $250 each. Vrba does compelling, engaging work, very much worth checking out.

2. The work now up at DOMA Gallery in Charlotte in a show entitled The Eyes of Carolina is now also available online HERE.

The show includes work by North Carolina-based photographers Eric Baden, Frank Konhaus (see above), Jeff Murphy, Rachel Nemecek, and Mike Smith.

This work looks very much worth seeing, and DOMA Gallery is at 1310 S Tryon Street, in Charlotte.

Call 'em at 704.333.3420 if you want to see the work, because they are apparently open now only by appointment (or so said the sign on the door this past Tuesday).

3. I've now, finally, received my copy of the annual Photography issue of Southern Cultures, the very fine quarterly published by the UNC Press for the Center for the Study of the American South.

This issue, guest-edited by Tom Rankin of Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies, contains a number of superlative essays, including Rankin's own essay, "The Cruel Radiance of the Obvious," about photography and the American South; Ben Child's "Mapping The Democratic Forest," on the work of William Eggleston; and Dolores Flamiano's "Heroes of Hell Hole Swamp," on the photographs of South Carolina midwives made by Hansel Mieth and W. Eugene Smith.

There are also first-class photo essays by Susan Harbage Page and Michael Carlebach.

Splendid work, all around, in this issue. And anyone who knows anything about academic institutional rivalries knows the significance of what I mean when I point out this is a joint product of Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

4. Speaking of Duke University, and their Center for Documentary Studies, CDS has announced the winners of the Daylight/CDS Photo Awards for 2011.This is a joint project of CDS and Daylight Magazine which used to be published in Chapel Hill, NC, but has, I think, now gone elsewhere.

There is more on the Daylight/CDS Photo Awards here.

This year's winners are Tamas Dezso, for his portfolio Here, Anywhere, and David Pace, for his work-in-progress Friday Night.

Well worth looking at through the award announcement is the work by the long list of Jurors' Choice and Honorable Mention selections, in addition to the work of the two winners.
There is exceptional work here, from photographers all over the world and all over the USA. The quality and diversity of the work, together with the exceptional geographic range of the photographers, bears strong witness to the importance of CDS (and of course Daylight Magazine) in the current practice of photography. You're doing good, guys. I'm proud to be an alumnus.

I of course looked for photographers here with Southern roots and didn't find any. I did find two folks not from around here who are doing work in the South this summer, Shane Lavalette,(who as we know is right now doing a commission for the High Museum) and Stacy Kranitz, who at the moment is somewhere in the South, and plans to be working here through September of this year.

You can see some of her work made Down Here on her Ongoing Narrative Blog, which we will continue to follow with interest. Ywesterday, she posted work from Garner, Kentucky, where she checked out a full-immersion baptism and a prayer meeting.

She calls this body of work-in-progress her Appalachian Summer, and she says you can check on her progress (and see if she's working near you) by emailing her at stacy@stacykranitz.com or by calling her up at 213.447.8229.

Its amazing, the phenomenon of social media, through which we can follow folks' work in pretty much real time.

How Others See Us . . . .

2011-08-03T14:31:00.002-04:00

Thanks to Kathleen Robbins for forwarding to me links to a photography show that was up in the De la War Pavilion, an exhibition space on the south coast of England, near Brighton, last winter from October 1st, 2010 to January 3rd, 2011, called Myth, Manners and Memory: Photographers of the American South.

From the perspective of a far away place, this show gives some insights into how the American South is understood, and how the photographing of it influences that understanding.

This is how the Pavilion describes its show:

"This exhibition brings together a number of prominent American artists who have, in various ways, engaged with the physical and psychological landscape of the southern states of the USA.

"Combining historical and contemporary works, it is a collection of memorable images of this distinctive region, its people and their lives as seen by artists including Walker Evans, William Eggleston, William Christenberry, Susan Lipper, Alec Soth and Carrie Mae Weems. Some of the artists make images from being Southerners themselves, some from experiences of spending a considerable length of time in the South as an outsider, and some informed by the region's history and social issues."

Jane Won, the curator for this show, is careful not to say that the show does anything specific like define the American South. Instead, it wants to explore "what is perhaps indefinable - the cultural complexities and tensions, the constant but unresolved dialogues between past and present, and the varying patterns of everyday life in the South that might, however elusively, constitute its sense of identity"

The curators made a video about this exhibition that is now on YouTube (see above). While the show was up, the gallery staff held a series of events focusing on it, and wrote about peoples' responses in a series of entries on the blog for the Pavilion (go HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE,and HERE.)

This material gathers random English perspectives on our region, including such insightful remarks as, "a colourful, poor, cruel, historical, segregated, vast, messy, frontier.” Or, "a reminder that American culture isn’t as comfortably, tediously uniform as some might have you believe.” Or, "stark, colourful, barren, lush." Or, "bruised, beat-up and abandoned." There you have it.

If one watches the video, one is reminded of a couple of key things about the South and fine art photography, namely that shows by Walker Evans and William Eggleston at MOMA were landmark events in the acceptance of photography as a fine art and in the development of the understandings of the range of acceptable practices in the making of a fine art photograph.

That's all fine and good, and one is pleased to see work by Walker Evans, William Eggleston, William Christenberry, and Carrie Mae Weems in this show.

But, of course, one needs to point out that Susan Lipper's work in this show was made in West Virginia, which isn't a Southern state. In fact, West Virginia came into being in the run-up to the Civil War precisely so that part of the country could escape having the experience of slavery, secession, war, and defeat that is indelibly part of Southern history, culture, and identity.

And the work by Alex Soth in this show is from his Sleeping by the Mississippi portfolio, a whole bunch of which was not made in the South at all, but in places like Minnesota and Iowa, because what holds it together as a body of work is the river, and in spite of the name of the river, its a damn long river and goes all kinds of places.

Surely there more contemporary photographers with deeper Southern roots than Soth or Lipper worthy of being on the wall alongside Evans, Eggleston, Christenberry, and Weems.

Also, if you watch the video, you will hear in the soundtrack Appalachian music, certainly Southern music, but more narrowly regional than the Blues, which would have been my choice of music that speaks more from the heart of Southern experience.

The folks in Brighton showed a series of movies -- choosing from among many possibilities, a documentary on William Eggleston, called William Eggleston in the Real World, and a series of major films, including the Elizabeth Taylor/Paul Newman take on Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the George Clooney vehicle O Brother Where Art Thou?, and a film with which I am not familiar with Robert Duvall called God and Generals, about Stonewall Jackson.

However fine and interesting these movies are (at least they didn't show Gone with the Wind), the best movie about the South and American culture is Godfrey Cheshire's 2008 documentary movie Moving Midway about the issues around the moving of a plantation house, and the image of the plantation in American culture, and the complexities of Southern families and their heritage.

If you haven't seen Moving Midway, you really need to. Here's the trailer:

Or this version of the trailer, done for the 2008 presidential campaign:

But back to England -- on October 21st of last year one Richard Gray, a Professor of Literature at the University of Essex, about, as they promised, "what makes the American South different, special and even strange. He will be placing the photographs on display in the exhibition in the contexts of Southern history and mythology and, in particular, in the context of Southern literature - how writers from the region have created a place that seems to exist somewhere between the actual and the imagined."

Wish I could have been there for that one.

Catching Up with the eZines -- One One Thousand and South x Southeast for Mid-Summer

2011-08-02T10:59:00.002-04:00

One of the delights of trying to keep track of fine art photography done in the South or by Southern photographers in the last several years has been watching the emergence of the online photo magazines One One Thousand and South x Southeast. One One Thousand showcases a single photographer twice each month, while South x Southeast gives us a single monthly issue filled with images, interviews, news, and the like.

The latest photographer to be featured in One One Thousand is the Philadelphia-based Lori Waselchuk, whose portfolio of images made in Louisiana's Angola prison documents the innovative hospice program that offers long-term prisoners at the end of their lives some measure of respect and dignity.

We have discussed Lori's work before on this blog, HERE, so will direct you to that presentation, except to reinforce the point that the clarity and elegance of her images embody the common humanity we all share, regardless of the side of the fence we find ourselves.

I'll let Lori speak for her own work. She says, "I focused on moments of connection between caregiver and patient, which can reveal both love and vulnerability. I am inspired by the inmates’ courage to confront their own regrets and fears in order to accept their capacity to love. The inmates have allowed me to visualize what I believe is at the core of addressing social inequalities: the recognition of our shared humanity."

'Nuff said.

South x Southeast's August issue is out, HERE, and it features work by Sheila Pree Bright, Jerry Uelsmann, Laura Noel, Gordon Stettinius and Terry Brown, Thomas Fahley, Maude Schuyler Clay, Annie Hogan, Gillian Laub, and Pam Moxley, among a host of other things, all of interest to those engaged in Southern photography.

Full access to South x Southeast only comes with payment of (a modest) subscription fee, so I'm still working out how to feature its contents on this blog. I want to provide information about the photographers featured in each month's issue but I also want to honor the good editorial work of those who bring this work to us in this format.

This is a concept in progress for me. We will see how it goes. The image above, a haunting image of a former slave cabin superimposed on an image of the master's house, from Annie Hogan's Double Vision portfolio, is from Hogan's website, though you will find lots more of her work, along with additional editorial content, in the August South x Southeast.

Lets just say for now that a reason to subscribe might be Maude Clay's portfolio called Erasing Sally Mann, a collection of photographs of Sally Mann's work prints deteriorating in the Southern weather of Mississippi. Since one of Mann's portfolios is of human bodies deteriorating in the Southern weather of Virginia, this is an interesting conceit for a project.

Jerry Atnip is Having a Memorable 2011

2011-07-27T15:43:00.000-04:00

Nashville-based photographer Jerry Atnip is having an exceptional year, with multiple exhibitions of his work both here and abroad.

We noted earlier his participation in the 4th Annuale, now up at Charlotte, NC's Light Factory.

We now learn he also now has work in the Emirates Photography Exhibition at the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture & Heritage, Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, one of three photographers representing the USA in this exhibition. .

But Jerry, this year, has also had work on display internationally in shows in Geneva, Switzerland; Paris, France; and Budapest, Hungary.

Nor has he neglected the domestic front, with work in shows in Atlanta, GA; Paducah, KY; Nashville, TN; Boone, NC: Monroe, LA; and Nagagdoches, TX.

Jerry does stunning B&W work so all this recognition is well-deserved. I'm only hoping he got to go to the opening reception for every one of these shows.

John Edwin Mason on South x Southeast Photomagazine and Southern Photography

2011-07-23T14:44:00.001-04:00

John Edwin Mason, who I think hails from Virginia and who I know does documentary photography of drag racing in Virginia and carnivals in South Africa, has a lengthy review of the first issue of South x Southeast Photomagazine HERE.

John has great -- and well-deserved -- things to say about SxSE. He also has some very interesting things to say about the question with which I started this blog. That's the question of whether there is a distinctive Southern photography.

John asks, "Is there really anything distinctive about Southern photography? Which is just another way of asking, Is there anything distinctive about the South?"

John says there is, and for him it comes down to race, place, and memory.

This is what John has to say:

"It's hard to imagine any part of America (and few places on earth) where place, race, and memory don't matter. . . . . . It's not their mere existence that makes the South distinctive, it's their prominence and their particular configuration in the region's history and culture. This is reflected, to one extent or another, in Southern photography.

"Take race. African-Americans have lived in all regions of this country, and segregation has often shaped our lives. But in the South, more so than in any other part of the country, racial segregation has co-existed with racial proximity, even racial intimacy. Black and white Southerners have been much more likely than people elsewhere to know each other by name, to live near each other, and, in the case of servants and slaves and masters and mistresses, among each other.

"Spatial proximity has had cultural consequences. You hear it in Southern speech and music; you feel it in Southern manners; you taste it in Southern food; you read it in Southern literature; and you see it in Southern photography.

"Take memory. More so than other parts of the country, Southern memory is about violence, loss, and dispossession. The precise content of these memories isn't necessarily the same for all Southerners. (Think, for instance, about what slavery and the Civil War signify to blacks, on the one hand, and to whites, on the other.)

"But no matter who we're talking about, many of the most powerful memories are about humiliation and defeat on American soil, memories of a kind that no other Americans share (or didn't share until 11 September 2001.) This is also part of Southern photography. So, too, is its dialectical opposite, the insistence on finding dignity and worth in the midst of a legacy of suffering.

"Take place. In the South, the history that matters the most is the history that happened here, right here, in this place. Southern artists, the great ones anyway, know that Faulkner was right when he said that "the past isn't over. It isn't even past." Yesterday is inescapable. Without it, we can't understand today."

For John, there is a South, and a Southern photography, and their identities are wrapped up in how they engage the questions of race, place, and memory. That's not all there is to it, but I think that's a good place to start.

I'm not sure John knows about The Blog about FineArt photography in the American South but I hope I can get his attention so he can join in some of our conversations.

Jeff Rich Continues to Have a Year to Remember as a Photographer

2011-07-19T14:02:00.000-04:00

In the last year, Savannah-based photographer Jeff Rich has had work in numerous shows, has won major prizes including the Critical Mass Book Publication Prize and the Magenta Flash Foward Emerging Photographer Prize, and now he's in One One Thousand with the second portfolio of his work documenting the landscape of the watersheds that make up the southeastern quarter of the Mississippi River Basin.

This portfolio is called Watershed: Chapter II - The Tennessee River. It attends to the complex situation of a system of rivers that the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) tries to control and harness for the abatement of flooding, navigation on the rivers, economic development, and finally electric power production.

Jeff 's landscapes are about the relationship between the natural and the human, unlike the older, Ansel Adams--inspired school of landscape photography that took as a basic principle the exclusion of signs of "the hand of man," of human habitation.

I will never forget when I learned that the natural -- exclusive of the human -- was a human construct, that, for example, when creating the Great Smokey Mountains National Park the Park Service did not simply fence in a vast wilderness but in fact had to move people off the land whose natural beauty they sought to preserve. They in fact created the wilderness, not simply preserve it.

Jeff photographs the natural world as most of us experience it today, acknowledging that bridges and power lines and and human beings are as much a part of a landscape as the rocks, trees, and water.

Jeff has a strong ethical element in his work, supporting responsible and sustainable human presence in the natural environment. He has a strong sense of light and composition. I'm intrigued by the way in which he engages human and built elements with water and trees and and other physical elements of the land into his images.

I'm glad he's been listed for some time now as a Southern Photographer We Watch Out For. In his work and in his career there's a lot to see.

Dana Mueller on One One Thousand

2011-07-19T10:44:00.001-04:00

The New Orleans-based fine art photography ezine One One Thousand is featuring at the moment the work of Dana Mueller, a Massachusetts-based photographer whose journey as an artist has taken her from cold war East Germany to Boston, Massachusetts and now to a cotton field in rural North Carolina, near Elizabeth City.

Mueller's portfolio is called The Devil's Den, and it is so rich in strong images and yet so rife with conceptual ironies as to be worthy of some serious reflection about photography as an artistic medium at the present moment.

Let's just say up front that photography is a complex medium of artistic practice that in its fullest sense combines artistic intention, technical skill in realization, social structures of presentation, and an audience for its reception that is a mix of personal history and taste as well as a socially-constructed understanding (or understandings) of what constitutes art and history and culture. Individual images reside at the intersection of all these elements, and we make meaning of them by responding to them or bringing them together in our own experience.

Now lets consider the image above, an image shot in a cotton field in eastern North Carolina sometime in the late spring, on an overcast day, when the leaves of the cotton plant are lush and green, when the blossoms of the cotton plant are just coming into bloom.

This is an elegantly maintained cotton field. There are no weeds in the white earth that separates the rows of cotton.

My guess is, looking at the pristine surface of these cotton plants, that it has recently rained, and the rain has washed away the dust that swirls up from that white earth in cotton fields like this one, and perhaps also washed away the traces of the insecticide that has been sprayed on these plants to protect them from the boll weevil and other destructive insects that would make the practice of cotton farming even more hazardous and risky than it usually is.

Soon the blossoms will turn into the fruit of the cotton plant, the cotton bolls that will contain the seed, and the plant will surround them with a hard husk that will burst with white fibers that today will eventually be harvested by a mechanized cotton picker, run through a gin that will separate the seeds and husk of the cotton boll from the fibers and and the fibers will be collected and sent off to cotton mills that will turn the fibers into cloth, perhaps curtains or upholstery, or perhaps clothing, perhaps blue jeans, perhaps shirts or pants or coats, or perhaps even flags that symbolize national and cultural identity.

But that time is some months off in this image, which exists now at a moment of seeming tranquility, from which signs of time's passage are mostly absent from the plants themselves, locating them in a kind of timeless place, an image made up of lines and shapes and organization and color. Except for the poles sticking up against the overcast sky that remind us there is electricity in this landscape, one can easily imagine this image being made anytime in the past 250 or 300 years.

Formally considered, this is an elegant image, with lots of compositional things working for it, with the rows of uniform green divided -- and complemented by -- the whiteness of the rows of soil that divide them and enriched by the whiteness of the occasional blossom, a whiteness that will be picked up in the whiteness of the house on the horizon line.

The photographer has placed the camera at a point in the cotton field so that the rows of cotton plants draw us in from the surface of the image into the field, and through the field to the grove of trees toward the rear of the image, where the trees to some degree will shelter the house they surround from the merciless Southern summer sun.

But of course not the workers. There is no shelter for the workers. If you are from "around here," you know this is the "land of cotton," and so this image comes as a haunted landscape, a landscape populated by the ghosts of slaves who were bought and compelled to work this land, to grow cotton, to chop the weeds and tend the plants and to do the hard, back-breaking labor of picking it and getting it to the gins and the mills. And it is also haunted by the ghosts of their children who worked this land in their day, in the day of Jim Crow, on this land haunted by its past.

Especially it is haunted by those ghosts because it comes to us in a portfolio called The Devil's Den. Because -- whatever else the phrase "Devil's Den" might mean to Mueller or someone else -- around here the Devil's Den is a place near Gettysburg, PA, on the site of a battle which was the high water mark of Southern efforts to defend the right to buy human beings and compel them to work in these fields and to grow and pick this cotton. So the ghosts that haunt this field include the ghosts of the hundreds of thousands of men who died to preserve or to end the practices that once filled fields like this one with the workers who were compelled made it productive.

So that's my context for reception of Mueller's image, and so this image is to me at once a reminder of that past and also a romanticizing of it, an evocation of Southern history and a distancing of us from it, an image that is both evocative of time and yet drained of the dust, the heat, the labor, the grit, the sweat, the agony, the suffering, the rage, that are all fully part of it. Art can evoke; art can distance. Art can enable us to look; art can help us forget.

But here the real ironies start to kick in. For Mueller, this is also a haunted land, but its haunted by a different set of ghosts. What has brought Mueller to this cotton field in eastern North Carolina has nothing to do with Southern history, with the Devil's Den in Pennsylvania, with the tortured legacy of slavery, when cotton was king and life was cheap. Indeed, Mueller imagines labor in this field as a "caring, benign work with the land," which of course means she has never worked in a cotton field, or seen it done.

Mueller comes here on a different trail, on a different journey, following ghosts of a totally different set of horrors and devastation and rampant cruelty. Mueller seeks traces of another war, World War II, and the ghosts of her people, her ancestors, and their legacy of violence, destruction, and genocide. For it turns out that a significant number of Germans were taken prisoner in World War II and were brought to prisoner of war camps in the eastern USA (over 400,000 by the end of the war, it seems), and especially, it seems, in the American South.

Mueller has sought in recent years to find traces of their presence in her adopted country. Her concern has been to address "exile, German identity, memory, history and landscape" by photographing "sites related to the WWII German Prisoner-of-War experience in the US."

As she puts it, "There is an irony where these German soldiers, both high-ranking Nazi officers and foot soldiers, were tilling the fields, cutting the lumber, picking apples, taking care of the American soil. This caring, benign work with the land stands in complete contrast to the horrific actions by Nazis and German soldiers in Eastern Europe of that time, such as Hitler's scorched earth policy."

I'm not sure the German prisoners who worked in the cotton fields fields of eastern North Carolina had caring or benign feelings about that land or their work, but let that pass. What is more intriguing is Mueller's sense of her goal in photographing this landscape. "I wanted," she writes, "to visually evoke the dualities that have characterized the German people over centuries, a people that are capable of both tremendous progress and destruction."

Further, she notes, "Romanticism has played a role in understanding the relationship of Germans to the landscape. In some photographs the land is overgrown appearing in a kind of primal state, suggesting the return to the original forest. It also suggests a fascist aesthetic of purity promoted by pre-war German culture. Innocence and purity can be seen as a natural desire to regress after one has become corrupted."

The ironies multiply. Mueller's images -- when seen by these Southern eyes -- themselves romanticize a landscape haunted by the history of slavery; to her these images foreground the way romanticism promises an escape from one's sense of one's corruption through fantasies of regression into a primal state, escaping into fabrications of innocence and purity.

Well, that's what Southern white folks did after the Civil War, combining fables about the purity of antebellum Southern life with the violence of Jim Crow and the Klan.

We can talk another time about whether (or how) a back story or a concept can elevate the subject matter of a photograph of an ordinary place into something special or unique, but for now, thanks to Dana Mueller for following her relatives to the cotton fields of eastern North Carolina, and for giving us some language and images to think not only about her predicament but ours as well.

And thanks to the folks at One One Thousand who put Mueller's work in their publication and in their editorial remarks on this portfolio remind us of the resonance for Southerners of the phrase Devil's Den but don't try to speculate on why Mueller might have chosen it for the title of her portfolio. Good to help us wonder.

Gordon Parks and the FSA

2011-07-18T08:28:00.000-04:00

The distinguished photographer and film maker Gordon Parks was born in Kansas, but his legacy was the legacy of Southern history, and he made coming to terms with that history as an African-American an essential part of his life's work as a photographer.

Parks died in 2002, but a new book of his work for the Farm Service Administration (FSA), called Fields of Vision: The Photographs of Gordon Parks, is just out from the Library of Congress and Giles Publishing company.

In celebration of its publication the New York Times has a feature on Parks, including a portfolio of the images from this book, on its LENS blog, HERE.

Parks' work for the FSA documents Americans deep in the Depression and African-Americans deep in both the Depression and the experience of American apartheid we call Jim Crow. I'm certainly buying a copy of this book, and I encourage you to do the same.

Rachel Nemecek is Having a Fine Summer in Charlotte

2011-07-17T14:30:00.001-04:00

Charlotte-based photographer Rachel Nemecek is having a summer to remember in Charlotte. She has work in two juried shows at the moment, one at the DOMA Gallery and the other at the Light Factory, Charlotte's center for still and moving photography.

I had the good fortune to see her work in the Light Factory show on Saturday (DOMA, bless 'em, was closed for the day), and I came away strongly taken with this work.

This work is from a portfolio called Waiting and Rachel says of it, "This collection covers photos taken over the last year or so while waiting. Often waiting on my son or at some family activity. Often in very institutional places, with bad florescent lighting. Often where every room is painted a vague shade of tan. Often for quite some time. Unlike my world – either the one I live in or the one in my head – the world here is quiet. There is a feeling of suspension; moments between what has happened and what might happen next. A sense of relief or respite, of interruption. A time out to examine the objects around, which are all waiting too, and will be long after we are gone. A time to wait for what will come."

The feeling of "time out" is palpable in these images, time out to consider the form of a pencil sharpener or of a handicapped access chair in a swimming pool, or of a very institutional doorway leading to a stairwell.

Rachel's handling of light and composition in her images is masterful. She has chosen to present this work printed relatively small (maybe 8x10 or so), and simply matted in a classic frame. The format invites the viewer into the kind of contemplation that produced it.

A photographer friend once told me advice her teacher had given her about photography that if you can't make it good, make it big, and if you can't make it big, make it red. This work does not to be big or red to be engaging and rewarding.

Rachel is doing good work, and I look forward to seeing more of it, so I'm adding her to my list of Southern Photographers We're Getting to Know.

Southern Photographers in Fraction Magazine Show in San Francisco

2011-07-15T15:26:00.004-04:00

The on-line magazine Fraction, and its attendant blog, are among the most respected sites on the photography web. They have been in business for three years and have published 28 issues, each assembling work around a central theme, idea, or concept, and each showing portfolios of a number of photographers.

Their choices of photographers over the years constitute a first-rate guide to styles, trends, and practitioners in contemporary fine art photography.

Now Fraction has gone over the the real world and planned a show of work by 30 of the photographers they have featured in the on-line magazine, to be held at the Gallery of the Rayko Photography Center at 428 Third Street, in San Francisco.

The show has been curated by David Bram, the founder and editor of Fraction. It will be called Fraction Magazine: Three Years in the Making. It opens with a reception on August 11th, 2011 and will be up through September 18th.

We discuss this here because photographers with Southern connections are often featured in Fraction. In fact, I have first made the acquaintance of a number of photographers featured on this blog through their appearance in Fraction.

Photographers living and/or working in the South who have work in this show because they have previously been featured in various issues of Fraction include Hollis Bennett, Polly Chandler, Eliot Dudik, Meg Griffiths, Norman Mauskopf, Samuel Portera, Kathleen Robbins, Michael Sebastian, and Allison V Smith,

That's a fine group of folks. Glad to have made their acquaintance, as well as the acquaintance of other Southern photographers, in the web pages of Fraction.

Ann George Wins Professional Women Photographers Prize

2011-07-14T14:34:00.001-04:00

Louisiana photographer Ann Marye George has been named winner of an international contest sponsored by the Professional Women Photographers Association. The theme of the competition was CONTRASTS, and Ann won with a set of three images, including the one shown above.

More of Ann's work is on her website HERE. There is an interview with her on the PWP blog HERE.

Ann does intriguing work, much of it in a romantic mood, with lots of attention to surface textures, to interesting use of monochromatic tones, and to evocative imagery, as well as more classic, very well seen B&W work.

Though she did shoot a portfolio of straight color portraits of Rod Stewart in concert. Oh well, a shooter has got to get paid, after all.

Thanks to Lori Vrba for bringing Ann and her work, and her award, to my attention.

Is Shelby Lee Adams a Realist or a Pornographer?

2011-07-13T18:12:00.006-04:00

Shelby Lee Adams has been photographing his friends and neighbors in Kentucky for years. Now, he has gotten the attention of folks who find the people he photographs painful to look at, and so his work has been labeled Poverty Porn by one Jason Huettner.

Check out the story HERE, on an interesting blog called Hyperallergic: Sensitive to Art and its Discontents, which at the moment also includes other interesting stories about photography in the South, including this one on the Marigny section of New Orleans and this one on Amy Mackie and the Southern Open, an art show she juried in Lafayette, LA.

I bet there's more stuff on this blog of interest to us, and I'll start digging it up.

For the moment, back to Shelby Lee Adams.

I will defend any Southern photographer's right to document Southern culture in all its diversity and complexity. The term "pornography" is a complex word, usually referring to the viewer, not the subject, and applicable to work intended to exploit the viewer's sense of inadequacies in life, catering to unsatisfied desires for control, for possession, for the illusion of power through superficial visual gratification.

In fact, the term may well be applied far more readily in Southern photography to some of the work shot for magazines like Southern Living and Garden and Gun, where the white country club culture of the South is glorified, commodified, and celebrated and made available in all its sterile glory to the rest of us for a couple of bucks an issue.

Jason Huettner ends his piece on Adams in rather condescending fashion, finding that Adams does not measure up to his standard for photographing folks who are not part of the middle class, which must include awareness that one is working in "an ethnographic or documentary capacity" and "must be cognizant of the politics of representation and the agency of their subjects."

In Adams' work, I in fact see people who enjoy being who they are, living the lives they have come to live. I have no idea how these folks really feel about themselves, but in Adams' images they seem at peace with themselves. If anything, Adams' images are neither realistic nor pornographic but romantic, owing far more to Flannery O'Connor than to Larry Flynt.

Joerg Colberg over on the Conscientious blog also has some concerns about Huettner's piece, though they are different from mine. He argues that complaining about the kind of work Adams does is useless, because "our hand-wringing about these photographs ultimately won’t have any consequences - unless we spring into some sort of actual action." Which we are unlikely to do.

I'm all for Shelby Lee Adams. And, contrary to Joerg Colberg, I'm not wringing my hands over these folks. Adams' work clearly makes some middle class folks uncomfortable at a time when so much fine art photography is about cleverness, irony, and the celebration of the reassuringly bland. His work is a reminder that people who live differently make us want to make them like us.

The folks in Adams' images look remarkably like some of the folks I'm related to. I don't want to live their lives, and they don't want to live mine, but once a year at the family reunion we acknowledge we are kinfolks, and the South is big enough for all of us.

UPDATED -- North Carolina Photographers Featured at Light Factory and DOMA Gallery, also at the NC Museum of Art

2011-07-11T13:52:00.007-04:00

Charlotte's Light Factory now has up its fourth juried Annuale, through September 25th, 2011, at the Light Factory, 345 North College Street, in Charlotte.

Susan Edwards was the juror.

Winners include Asheville, NC's Scott Hubener, Matthews, NC's Glenn DeRosa, Charlotte's Rachel Nemecek, and Nashville's Jerry Atnip.

(Winners also include Lynda Harris and Ronit Citri, but, as my father would say, they aren't from around here.)

More about all of them HERE.

Also in Charlotte, DOMA Photography Gallery at 1310 South Tryon Street, is hosting a juried exhibit of work by five North Carolina photographers, entitled the "Eyes of Carolina Exhibition," up now through September 3, 2011.

This show features work by Asheville's Eric Baden, Chapel Hill's Frank Konhaus, Wilmington's Mike Smith, and Charlotte's Jeff Murphy and Rachel Nemecek.

Images from this show are now available on line from DOMA, HERE.

Since Rachel is having a summer to remember, her image gets featured on this blog entry (see above).

Larry Wheeler, the Director of North Carolina Museum of Art, was the juror. You can read his remarks about his selections HERE.

Speaking of Larry Wheeler, his museum in Raleigh (well, OUR museum in Raleigh, but he runs it), better known as the North Carolina Museum of Art, is hosting two shows this summer that alsoeature North Carolina photographers in prominent roles.

One is entitled Landscape Sublime: Contemporary Photography (up now through November 13th), which includes the work of a who's who of distinguished North Carolina photographers -- John Menapace, Elizabeth Matheson, David Simonton, Titus Heagins, Caroline Vaughan, and Alex Harris.

The other show is entitled Mirror Image: Women Portraying Women, up now through November 27th.

This is a multi-media show that includes paintings and other media, but also includes photographs by North Carolina photographers Margaret Sartor, Linda Foard Roberts, elin o’Hara slavick, Caroline Vaughan, Mary Shannon Johnstone, and Susan Harbage Page.

Both these shows are in the NCMA's East Building, and both are well worth a long, meditative visit.

John Rosenthal at the Gregg Museum

2011-07-07T18:12:00.000-04:00

Chapel Hill, NC photographer John Rosenthal has a major show of work made in New Orleans, called THEN... ABSENCE: after Katrina in the Lower Ninth Ward, at the Gregg Museum of Art and Design, on the campus of NC State University, in Raleigh, NC, up now through August 13th, 2011.

John is a long-time resident of Chapel Hill, though he started his career as a photographer in New York City, creating a body of work published in 1998 by Safe Harbor Books with the title Regarding Manhattan.

He was also published in the 2005 volume QUARTET: Four North Carolina Photographers, also by Safe Harbor Books, along with Ron Amberg, Elizabeth Matheson, and Caroline Vaughan.

John is known primarily for contemplative Black & White photography. In this show, he switches to color work for a series of compelling images made in New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward two years after Katrina.

John got to Katrina-ravaged New Orleans and to the poor neighborhood of the Ninth Ward after the flood waters had receded, after bulldozers had removed the wreckage of more than 5,300 homes, leaving nothing but streets and foundations to indicate where a densely populated neighborhood had once stood.

John's emphasis in this work is on the lingering traces of what happened, traces of what has been lost. For little has been replaced or restored. Only a small percentage the the houses have been rebuilt, and there is still no fire department, grocery store, or medical clinic in the neighborhood.

John's work emphasizes destruction of community centers, especially destroyed churches, ruined flags, religious figures strewn in the grass, steps that lead nowhere,. In a way the iconic shot of the show is of a building with a sign painted on the wall that reads, "1600 people died so you could take this picture."

One might say that post-Katrina New Orleans has been overworked by photographers, but when the work is as strong as John's, it's very much worth doing, and seeing, if you are in Raleigh.

Major Photography Shows In but Only Tangentially Of The South, Part One -- The Jazz Loft Project

2011-07-07T09:34:00.002-04:00

Duke University's Nasher Museum is hosting a splendid show of photographs at the moment by the distinguished mid-20th-century photographer W. Eugene Smith called The Jazz Loft Project: W. Eugene Smith in New York City, 1957-1965.

The images in this show are classic '50s-60s black and white shots of street scenes in NYC's flower district and of jazz musicians, notably Thelonious Monk, Zoot Sims, Charlie Mingus, Roland Kirk, Bill Evans, and others who were in the process of transforming the 40s big band jazz of Ellington and Basie into the small group be-bop and post-bop styles on which contemporary mainstream jazz is based.

These musicians shared a dilapidated five-story loft building at 821 Sixth Avenue with Smith, who had left his job with Life Magazine in the mid-1950's and moved into the building while he pursued his Pittsburgh project, a freelance documentary job that turned into a four-year obsession that Smith was never able to finish.

Smith was obsessive about everything he did. While living in the building at 821 Sixth Avenue, he shot 1,447 rolls of film, over 40,000 photographs, the largest body of work in his career, making some of the iconic portraits of the jazz musicians with whom he shared the space, as well as a rich body of street photographs, chiefly of life on the streets of the flower district, as seen from his fourth-floor window.

Smith also turned the building into a recording studio by setting up reel-to-reel tape recorders and made 1,740 reels (4,000 hours) of stereo and mono audiotapes, capturing more than 300 musicians rehearsing, composing, and planning their careers.

In addition to the photographs of the musicians and the NYC street scenes, Smith also documented visits to the Jazz Loft by a host of other notables, including Norman Mailer, Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Salvidor Dali, as well as pimps, prostitutes, drug addicts, thieves, photography students, local cops, building inspectors and marijuana dealers.

When Smith died, this vast body of work was sent to the University of Arizona's Center for Creative Photography with the rest of Smith's archive, where it sat in obscurity until it came to the attention of the photographic historian Sam Stephenson, a member of the staff at Duke's Center for Documentary Studies.

Stevenson stumbled across this material while working on a project to make something of the thousands of images Smith made in Pittsburgh. That effort resulted in the book Dream Street: W. Eugeme Smith's Pittsburgh Project 1955-1958, after which Stevenson turned to the Jazz Loft material, which has led to its own book, and to a website, and to a radio show, and to this exhibition.

This show features original prints of many of Smith's images, which remind us that Smith was a wizard in the darkroom as well as with the camera. It also includes excerpts from some of the recordings.

After the show closes in Durham later this month, it is off to the Museum of Photographic Arts  in San Diego and the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona.

Southern connections? After all, Smith was from Kansas. Well, the Center for Documentary Studies is in the South, Sam Stevenson is on its staff, the exhibit is at the Nasher, which is also in the South, jazz music is rooted in the African-American culture of the South, and a number of the musicians seen or heard in this material were Southerners, including Thelonious Monk, who was born in Rocky Mount, NC.

This is a must-see show. Get there, or get the book, or both.

Alia Malley's Southland

2011-07-06T21:05:00.003-04:00

Given the name of Alia Malley's portfolio Southland and the look of the images (see above), you would think that her work was made in the American South. But it wasn't.

For an interview with Alia Malley on the Conscientious blog, go HERE. In this conversation, Malley explains where this body of work was made, and what was on her mind, and how to raise money on Kickstarter, but not why she named the portfolio Southland. Oh well.

Magdalena Sole Photographs the Mississippi Delta

2011-07-01T15:55:00.002-04:00

Spanish-born and NYC-based photographer Magdalena Sole has published a portfolio of her photographs of the Mississippi Delta in the latest issue (Issue 28) of the on-line photomagazine Fraction.

Magdalena was born in Spain while Franco was dictator of that country. Her family fled to Switzerland, where she learned what life is like as a stranger, as one who, as she says, had to live while "navigating a society that was very hostile to outsiders." Here, she says, she learned "to understand exclusion, and a life lived at the margins."

As a result, she felt at home in the Mississippi Delta: "I was drawn to the people I met in the Delta," she says. "Unlike most people I had encountered in other areas, Delta people allowed me to slip into their midst as if they had known me forever; we could swap stories and laughter, sorrow and silence. This happened not just once or twice; it happened every day in every town. In the most unexpected places I found kinship. I arrived as an outsider, but I was gradually so absorbed into the fabric of life there that I felt not like an outsider but rather like the family member who happened to have the camera."

Magdalena says, "The Delta evokes visions of sharecroppers, plantations and, of course, the sound of the Blues. The area has a small wealthy gentry and a large impoverished underclass living in dilapidated houses and tilting trailers. The Delta is one of the poorest places in the United States with the saddest infant mortality rate, rampant unemployment and little hope for a better future."

On the other hand, she says, "What is little known is the resilience, resourcefulness and family cohesiveness of its people." Its this quality of Delta life that she captures well in her images. She's been to the South many times now, and we hope she keeps coming back.

Hope she meets Kathleen Robbins on one of her trips -- I expect they would have a lot to say to each other as they look at each other's work. I'd love to be a fly on the wall for that conversation.

See more of her work on the Fraction website, and also on her home page, and watch for her forthcoming book entitled “New Delta Rising," to be published by the University Press of Mississippi in early 2012.

South x Southeast photomagazine Now Launched!

2011-06-30T10:11:00.001-04:00

South x Southeast, the new online photomagazine of photography in the Southeast, is now launched.

Ths first issue is rich with imagery by Shelby Lee Adams, Anderson Scott, Brandon Schulman; interviews with Jack Spencer and Marylin Suriani; a feature on the museum at Hampton University; a report on Look3 2011; and a whole slew of other stuff.

This is a must-see, folks. Check it out.

June in One One Thousand

2011-06-28T14:36:00.003-04:00

The New Orleans-based photography ezine One One Thousand has featured some strong, thoughtful, and challenging B&W work in June.

This work includes the exceptionally strong as well as witty work by once-Washington, DC-based, but now Portland, Or, based photographer Lauren Henkin in her portfolio The Other Charleston, about the Charleston in West Virginia (see her image Pressed for Time, above).

I suspect Lauren has been looking long and well at urban landscape work by Walker Evans, especially his work in Bethlehem, PA from 1935, but she also brings to this work an exceptionally careful compositional eye, a concern for making the most from the smallest number of elements in the frame, and a a healthy sense of irony.

Lauren's work is available to us in a variety of ways, including her website at laurenhenkin.com, her hand made books at laurenhenkinbooks.com, her blog at laurenhenkinblog.com, and her interviews with gallerists, curators, educators, artists, and others at Photo Radio -- photoradioblog.com.

Also on One One Thousand this month, displaying its own particular brand of wit and irony, has been the portfolio of St Augustine, FL-based photographer Alexander Diaz, showing us Florida's Mountains.

If you missed the fact that Florida has mountains, be assured the "mountains" in Diaz' images are not the mountains familiar from traditional landscape photography of the Ansel Adams school, but mounds of earth thrown up by the displacement of the land to make way for suburban sprawl.

Through the use of carefully-chosen camera angles, Diaz shows us "resemblances of natural landscapes . . . metaphors, . . . indications of a transformation and act as painful reminders of a natural grandeur that no longer exists." He goes on, "I photograph these mounds to remind the viewer of the beauty that has been lost to progress. Not only are we losing what our society finds aesthetically pleasing, but more importantly, we are rapidly degrading what sustains us."

Diaz' work is a reminder that part of what concerns photographers today is the effect of photographing something on the way we see it, or the ways the act of photography shapes the reality we see, or think we see. The effect of this work requires, in part, holding together the image we see and the thing we know intellectually we are seeing photographed, as well as the tradition of landscape photographs to which Diaz' work alludes.

More of Diaz' work is on view at his website, http://alexdiazphoto.com/home.html.

Fall Line Press Opens in Atlanta

2011-06-28T13:34:00.002-04:00

Fall Line Press, a new photo book publishing enterprise created by Atlanta photographers William Boling and Michael David Murphy, is opening officially this Thursday, June 30th, 2011, at their headquarters at Brickworks, 1000 Marietta Street, Suite 112, in Atlanta, GA.

Fall Line publisher William Boling says the press is dedicated to the belief that the book is the way to combine photographs and writing, a combination that in his view has "from the beginning struck the central chord of the photographic medium."

He goes on: "Each generation of artists, photographers, writers and their audiences" has "turned to the book to communicate and explore . . . extended forms and complex statements" about the world. "Fall Line is devoted to working closely with contemporary artists, photographers and writers to produce works in books and editions that connect with these times and our community to move ahead the conversations that shape how we think and feel."

Fall Line's inaugural publication is the launching of a quarterly called Free Fall, which will feature each year the work of one photographer. Each volume of Free Fall (four issues) will be published in a limited edition of 50 signed copies, at a cost of $50.00.

The first volume will feature the work of Atlanta photographer Laura Noel and will be available at the official opening of the Press on June 30th. Volume Two will feature the work of Maury Gortemiller, yet another member of the thriving Atlanta-based photography community. It will begin to appear this fall.

The Fall Line Press facility also includes a photography book reading room, a true treasure in this or any age. Fall Line also has a blog you can follow, here --http://blog.falllinepress.com/ And you can read more about Fall Line here, from the GrapeHouse blog.

The Fall Line offices would seem to me to be the place to be if you are in Atlanta this Thursday. Fall Line Press seems to me like a courageous act of faith in the power of the book and of paper and ink when the trend of history in photography seems to be going on-line and electronic. Best wishes, folks, and keep me posted on your plans.

The South on Facing Change/Documenting America

2011-06-24T15:17:00.001-04:00

We've just learned about a new website called Facing Change/Documenting America which describes itself as the work of a "non-profit collective of dedicated photojournalists and writers coming together to explore America and to build a forum to chart its future."

The photographers include David Burnett, Alan Chin, Debbie Fleming Caffery, Danny Wilcox Frazier, Stanley Greene, Brenda Ann Kenneally, Andrew Lichtenstein, Carlos Javier Ortiz, Lucian Perkins, and Anthony Suau.

Of this group, only Debbie Fleming Caffrie (as best as I can tell) is formally a Southerner -- and she has first-rate work on this site -- but a number of the other photographers have done projects in the South for Facing Change.

These include Lucian Perkin' series on Christmas in Central Texas, Alan Chin's soulful images in the Deep South series, Andrew Lichtenstein's Civil War Anniversary portfolio and his West Virginia portfolio The Battle for Blair Mountain, and of course Debbie Fleming Caffrie's portfolio Louisiana.

FCDA takes its inspiration from the Farm Security Administration's work during the Great Depression and intends to "cover and publish under-reported aspects of America’s most urgent issues and distribute the work through a innovative online platform while highlighting the efforts of individuals and organizations working to affect positive change."

To do this, it will "embed photographer/writer teams in communities across America to vividly illustrate the nation’s most pressing concerns-from health care to immigration to the cost of the war on terror. The result will be an unparalleled collection of visual and textual narratives accessible through an innovative online platform-called the Public Sphere–enabling a direct dialogue with America on the stories and issues"

The writers involved with FC/DA are also first-class. They include Dan Baum, Katherine Boo, Alan Burdick, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Eliza Griswold, Margaret Knox, Alex Kotlowitz, Andrew Meier, and David Samuels.

There is strong work here, and we will try to keep up with work they publish that has a Southern focus. All the best, folks, in your ambitious undertaking.

South X Southeast Photo Magazine about to Launch

2011-06-23T14:18:00.001-04:00

Nancy McCrary, Publisher of the new magazine South by Southeast, announces that her magazine will appear on July 1st, 2011, and monthly thereafter.

Nancy describes the magazine as "a new online monthly and in-print quarterly magazine that will bring you anything and everything about photography in and of the Southeast. From galleries of work by our established masters to interesting series by new emerging artists—you’ll be covered. You will also see feature videos of the artists discussing their work while bringing you into their studios, as well as beautiful imagery they've created in motion."

She promises that Issue One, launching July 1st, will include Images from Shelby Lee Adams's new book Salt and Truth (see image above), Anderson Scott's Civil War Re-enactors photography, and Brandon Schulman's landscape photography, as well as interviews with photographer Jack Spencer and Marilyn Suriani, videos of William Eggleston and Larry Fink, and reports on festivals, museums, and (as they always say), much, much more.

In addition to Nancy the Publisher, John A. Bennette is serving as Artistic Director.

You can learn more at sxsemagazine.com, their website, or by contacting nancy@sxsemagazine.com.

All this good stuff doesn't come free, but they are offering a special introductory rate of $12/yr for the online version of the magazine.

I've already signed up for a subscription and look forward to seeing what the future holds for this new venue for photography in the American South.