A Celebration of Southern Photography at Southern Miss

Folks at the University of Southern Mississippi, in Hattiesburg, are celebrating Southern photography in a big way this October.

The Celebration includes two shows. 

The first, opening in the university's Gammill Gallery on Tuesday, October 10th, 2017, is Portraits of Southerners: Photographs from The Do Good Fund, up through Nov. 3rd, 2017.

The second, entitled Mississippi Landscapes: Places in the Land, opens in the Cook Library Art Gallery on October 12th and will be up through December 15th, 2017. 

This show features images by Mississippi photographers  Ashleigh Coleman Thomas Pearson, Euphus Ruth, David Wharton, Brooke White, and Malcolm White. 

Their work in this show is featured in a new book also entitled Places in the Land, to be available at this show. 

There will also be a special issue of The Southern Quarterly, the university's journal of Southern arts and culture, to mark the occasion, go here.  to mark this occasion.

In conjunction with these shows, distinguished Southern folklorist Dr. William R. Ferris will give a talk entitled “The South in Color: A Visual Journey,” on October 12th at 6 pm in Gonzales Auditorium. 

Ferris is a photographer and film maker and an expert in Southern studies, African American music, and folklore, who serves as the Joel R. Williamson Eminent Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 

Ferris co-edited the massive Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. His most recent book, The South in Color: A Visual Journal, was published in 2016 by the University of North Carolina Press. 

Ferris’s films include “Mississippi Blues,” which was featured at the Cannes Film Festival. He has produced numerous sound recordings and hosted “Highway 61,” a weekly blues program on Mississippi Public Radio, for nearly a decade.

This sounds like a splendid series of events.  I can't make it, and I'm hoping someone who does will send me a full report.