Dawoud Bey Named "One of the Greats"

Honorary Southern Photographer Dawoud Bey has been named "One of the Greats" by the New York Times, go here. 

The Times celebrates Bey and four other contemporary artists as "talents who, in mastering their crafts, have changed their fields — and the culture at large."

Bey is celebrated in the essay as an artist who "In the seemingly simple gesture of photographing Black subjects in everyday life, . . .  helped to introduce Blackness in the context of fine art long before it was trendy, or even accepted." 

This celebration of Bey's singular achievement in his career so far follows up on an earlier Times essay on Bey from 2018, go here. 

Bey was awarded a McArthur Fellowship in 2017, which led to this essay in the Washington Post, worth reading for an overview of Bey's illustrious career.

Bey has photographed in the American South as well as in Harlem and other locations. We featured him and his work in 2011 when he had a major show of work up at Emory University in Atlanta, go here.

Here is an image from that show, also featured in the 2018 Times essay.

Incidentally, the photographs of Bey in the NY Times article were made by another Honorary Southern Photographer, Latoya Ruby Frazier. 

Congratulations to Bey for this exceptionally well-deserved recognition!

Dawoud Bey at Emory University

Distinguished American photographer Dawoud Bey has a show up now in the Visual Arts Gallery at Emory University entitled the Emory Project, through March 5th, 2011. This show, which consists of some 20 double portraits of members of the Emory community, documents the diversity of people who work or study at Atlanta's most distinguished university.  

Bey's overall project also includes a web presence that includes over twice as many images as the actual on-site show in Atlanta.

The Emory Visual Arts Department commissioned Bey to develop this series of portraits as a way to celebrate the end of a five-year project to explore Emory's historic and current experiences of race, gender, sexuality and other forms of human difference. He made the work while serving as Artist-in-Residence at Emory in the spring of 2010.

Bey was born and grew up in New York City; he is now based in Chicago. So how does he wind up on this blog, devoted as it is to Southern fine art photography? 

Well, the people he photographed live or study in the South, and the show is in the South. And, in the end, given his subject matter and his approach to it, one could make the case that in spite of his places of origin and residence, he's a Southerner, too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

Southern Photographers in the News, Part 2 -- Early Spring, 2014

 
A couple more items from the news:

1. New Orleans-based photographer William Widmer is featured on the New Yorker magazine's website with a portfolio of his work A Cajun Courir, documenting Mardi Gras festivities in western coastal Louisiana.

This is a very un-New Orleans version of Mardi Gras.

The New Yorker describes Courir de Mardi Gras as "a ceremonial run that is believed to have its roots in Medieval French begging customs. Participants travel the countryside on horseback and on foot, soliciting ingredients for a communal gumbo that is prepared at the end of the run."

Some stunning images by Widmer on view here, well worth your attention.

2. Honorary Southern Photographer Dawoud Bey has several images in this year's Whitney Biennial, including the diptych Maxine Adams and Amelia Maxwell, from Bey's portfolio The Birmingham Project (see above).

Bey's work, including his formal portrait of Barack Obama, is on exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art,  at 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street, in Manhattan, through May 25th, 2014.

Good to see Southern photographers, and Southern subjects, on view in NYC.

Southern Photographers in the News -- Mid-Fall 2017

Honorary Southern Photographer Dawoud Bey (see image above) has been named the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. 

For more on Bey's career and his genius award, go here for the Chicago Tribune story, and here, for the Washington Post story.  

Greensboro-based artist Rhiannon Giddens also received a MacArthur Fellowship, but she's a musician, not a photographer. 

Former Lexington, VA photographer and gallery owner -- and now Gallery Director at Panopticon Gallery,in Boston, MA -- Kat Kiernan (see her to the right in the image above) has been profiled on Elin Spring's blog, go here. 

Kiernan has opened her first show at the Panopticon Gallery, which includes work by Raleigh-based photographer Diana Bloomfield (see image above) go here.

Bloomfield will be part of a two-person show with Amy Friend -- at Panopticon, entitled  Alchemists, go here. 

This show opens November 3rd and is up in Boston until December 30, 2017.

Nashville-based photographer Tamara Reynolds (see image above) has had work from her The Drake portfolio featured on the fotoroom blog, go here. 

 
Distinguished Southern Photographer William Eggleston (see image above by NY Times photographer Andrea Morales) continues to be noticed for his his expansion of his artistic media to include composing and performing music, go here. 

More to come on the Southern Photographer! 

The High Museum -- $4 Million for Photography

Atlanta's High Museum of Art has announced receipt of several gifts totaling nearly $4 million to support development and exhibition of its photography collection.

A gift from Donald Keough, former president and chief operating officer of Coca-Cola, and his wife Marilyn will endow a permanent curatorial position in photography and support ongoing photography programs and acquisitions at the Museum.

Currently held by Brett Abbott, the position will be named the Donald and Marilyn Keough Family Curator of Photography in recognition of their generosity.

The High also received a gift from Lucinda W. Bunnen, an Atlanta-based photographer and longtime supporter of the High’s photography collection, to create the first dedicated photography gallery in the Museum’s permanent collection space.

A gift from Paul Hagedorn will support photography acquisitions initiatives and initiate the department’s first acquisitions endowment, while a gift from the Yellowlees Family will be used to strengthen the Museum’s noteworthy collection of Southern photography.

 “These landmark gifts represent a transformational moment for photography at the High,” said Michael E. Shapiro, the High’s Nancy and Holcombe T. Green, Jr. director.

“Photography is our fastest growing area of collecting, research and programming, and these gifts will ensure that the High can continue our commitment to new scholarship and commissioning new works by living artists. We hope that these significant gifts inspire others to support our photography programs and the growth of our collection.”

The High Museum of Art wants us to know that it has been collecting photography for several decades and now holds more than 5,400 prints, holdings focus on American work of the 20th and 21st centuries, with special strength in modernist traditions, documentary genre and contemporary photography.

The collection also gives special attention to pictures made in and of the South, serving as the largest and most significant repository representing the region’s important contributions to the history of photography.

In this context, its worth noting that the High's “Picturing the South” initiative has commissioned established and emerging photographers to produce work inspired by the area’s geographical and cultural landscape.

Past participants include Sally Mann, Dawoud Bey, Emmet Gowin, Richard Misrach, Alex Webb and Alec Soth, whose commissions have all been added to the High’s permanent collection.

Congratulations to the High Museum, and to the good citizens of Atlanta, for their continuing support of photography in the American South.

The Importance of Photography for the American South

 

Grace Elizabeth Hale, who is the Commonwealth Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Virginia, has written a first-class article entitled "Photograph as History in the US South," in Southern Cultures, the quarterly publication of the Center for the Study of the American South, at UNC-Chapel Hill.  

Hale points out that while "We understand the South as a major site of U.S. history, a landscape littered with evidence of the past, from plantation slavery and the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement. What fewer people know is that the region is also an essential location in the history of photography. 

She goes on:

For photographers making work in the world rather than the studio, the South has been a rich place to make images. At odds with the grand story of America as expanding freedoms, the region has been understood as both the national reservoir of cultural authenticity and the national cesspool of white supremacy. The contradictions give artists a lot to look at. 

An admittedly partial list of photographers who have done important work in and about the U.S. South might start with Doris Ulmann and Walker Evans, Marion Post Wolcott and Arthur Rothstein, Clarence John Laughlin and Ralph Meatyard, Eudora Welty and Gordon Parks, Emmet Gowin and William Christenberry, William Eggleston and Dawoud Bey, Sally Mann and Carrie Mae Weems, Deborah Luster and Susan Lipper.

In much of this work, artists render the forms of history visible by returning to photograph the same place, people, or subjects at different times. They restage old images or revisit places photographed by others. They employ old photographic processes, formats, and materials. And they consciously go back to former histories, to older Souths and to the relationships people have constructed with these pasts. 

In their work, return as a practice, a process, a subject, and an aesthetic structures time and, in this way, marks and makes history. How we understand and give form and meaning to change over time becomes as much the subject of this work as what exists on the other side of the lens.

There is much more to learn from Hale's essay, and you can read it here: 

https://www.southerncultures.org/article/signs-of-return/

 

The Black Photographers Annual at the Virginia Musuem of Fine Arts

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts has a show up now through October 3rd, 2017 in their Photography Gallery featuring work by black photographers made during the 1970's.

This show is entitled A Commitment to the Community: The Black Photographers Annual.  
The photographs in this show were first published in the issue of the Black Photographers Annual for 1973.

Subsequent shows will feature work from each of the other three issues of the Black Photographers Annual, a publication that appeared four times between 1973 and 1980. 

All this work deserves vastly more attention than it receives these days.

But the shows at the VMFA will help. Already, the VMFA has digitized all four of the Black Photographers Annuals, and has them available for us to see on their website, go here.

The Black Photographers Annual was published by the folks at Kamoinge, or the Kamoinge Workshop, an organization of African-American photographers formed in New York City in 1963 with the purpose of "providing crucial support and solidarity" for African-American photographers who sought "artistic equality within the industry of photography."

Kamoinge is still very much alive today, see their website here.

Kamoinge gained "the attention of museums, universities, libraries, and galleries, by encouraging and enabling the exhibition of works by photographers of color for the first time." 

Publication of the Black Photographers Annual was part of fulfilling that mission. 

The first issue, published with an introductory essay by Toni Morrison, contained the work of forty-nine artists, including Louis Draper (see image at the top of this blog post) and Bill Jackson (see image directly above), made in Greenwood, Mississippi.

Later issues continued the original format of combining a group show of work by a wide range of artists together with in-depth portfolios of a much smaller selection of photographers. 

Photographers in the 4 volumes of the Black Photographers Album include names that would become familiar to us, like Gordon Parks and Dawoud Bey, but also the work of photographers far less well know, but altogether richly deserving of our attention.

Work included in these four albums ranges from iconic images, such as Moneta Sleet's photograph of Coretta Scott King at her husband's funeral (see image above), to street photographs, to portraits, pretty much covering the full range of styles and subject matter characteristic of photography in that period. 

I strongly encourage you to go to the VMFA's website and flip through the pages of the Black Photographers Annuals. 

Not only do we step back into a world that to me seems like yesterday, but in fact is rapidly becoming a period in history, but we also get to appreciate the quality of this work, and also recover something of the excitement generated by photography in the early days of its recognition as a fine art practice.

The show at the VMFA has been featured in an entry on the New York Times LENS blog, go here. 

Picturing the South -- Abelardo Morell at the High Museum

Up now, through May 18th, 2014, at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta is a photography show The Universe Next Door, featuring photographs by the Cuban-American photographer Abelardo Morell.

Thsi show constitutes a major retrospective of Morell's work, offering more than a hundred of Morell's photographs.

Included among them are the images Morell made in and around Atlanta as the latest photographer chosen by the High for its annual Picturing the South commission.

According to the High, Morell devoted his commission to two kinds of work that together create a kind of diptych of the Southern urban landscape.

Some of this work represents "trees – an iconic subject in the history of photography – in playfully unusual and imaginative ways" (see image below).

In addition to looking at trees of the Southern landscape, he has used a camera obscura to capture their urban counterpoint in several views of the Atlanta skyline (see image above).

The High established the practice of commissioning work for the Picturing the South project in 1996, asking established and emerging photographers to produce work inspired by the American South.

Past participants include Sally Mann, Dawoud Bey, Richard Misrach, Emmet Gowin, Alex Webb, Alec Soth, Martin Parr, Kael Alford, and Shane Lavalette, whose commissions have all been added to the High's permanent collection.

Long-time readers of this blog will remember that I have a complex relationship with the Picturing the South initiative at the High. I think the whole undertaking is fraught with issues.

Sometimes the work that comes in is profound, sometimes troubling (see Richard Misrach's work from two years ago), sometimes superficial. Sometimes it looks like the shooter flew into Atlanta, shot for a couple of days, then took the money and ran.

At least recently, the shooters engaged by the High have been Big Names from out of town. One remembers that there are many fine Southern photographers who have experience, vision, and technique, and who probably could use the work.

Time will tell how Morell's work stands up.

Beyond Beauty: Conversations at the Nasher

The Nasher Museum at Duke University is hosting a half-day conference on the role of photography in modern society, scrutinizing traditional ideas that photography can function as an agent of social change, a record of historical events, or a source of aesthetic pleasure.

The conference, to consist of a series of conversations among professionals in the field, will run from 1-6 pm on Friday, October 2nd, 2009, in the Nasher Museum.

Participating in the conversations will be photographers Dawoud Bey, Bill Burke, Eric Gottesman, Laurel Nakadate, Susan Meiselas, Tom Rankin, and Deborah Willis. They will be joined by Philip Brookman of the Corcoran Gallery of Art and Alison Nordström of the George Eastman House.

Paul Hendrickson, Lehman Brady Visiting Joint Chair Professor in Documentary Studies and American Studies at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, will conclude the conference with a talk about the archive's role in preserving and providing access to a society's photographic heritage.

This event is co-sponsored by the Archive of Documentary Arts at the Special Collections Library, the Center for Documentary Studies, and the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. It is free and open to the public.

Becoming: Questions of Identity at the Nasher

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UPDATED -- More News of Southern Photographers -- Fall 2015

Catching up with several items of note --

1. I missed the fact, somehow, that McNair Evans (see image above) had a show of work from his Confessions for a Son portfolio at the Sasha Wolf Gallery in NYC, up from late February until early April 2015.

Good to know that images of Laurinburg, NC were on the walls of a gallery in Manhattan. Its often good to get into town for a visit.

2. Honorary Southern Photographer Dawoud Bey has been named a USA Guttman Fellow in the United States Artists program, go here. 

3. Texas-based photographer Keith Carter (see image above) is opening a show of work from his Ghostland portfolio at the Photographs Do Not Bend Gallery in Houston, Texas,  on November 21st, go here. 

4. New Orleans-based photographer L. Kasimu Harris (see image above) has a show of work from his The 10 Year Journey: Reflections of Family, Identity and New Orleans portfolio, up now, through November 14th at the George and Leah McKenna Museum of African-American Art, in New Orleans.  

5. Atlanta-based photographer Debbie Fleming Caffrey (see image above) is having a show of work from her Alphabet portfolio at Jackson Fine Art Gallery in Atlanta, up now through November 28th, 2015. 

Also available at Jackson Fine Art are copies of Caffrey's book Alphabet, go here.

6. Raleigh-based photographer Diana Bloomfield (see image above) has work on the cover and inside the latest issue of Shadow and Light magazine, go here. 


More later, on The Southern Photographer.