John Scarlata Show at East Carolina University

Distinguished Southern photographer John Scarlata has a show drawn from the body of his life's work, entitled Living in the Light: A Retrospective, now up at the Wellington B. Gray Gallery at East Carolina University in Greenville, NC, through  February 20th, 2010.

A native of Long Island, Scarlata studied photography at the Brooks Institute of Photography and theCalifornia Institute of the Arts, receiving his MFA from the latter in 1976. Shortly thereafter, he moved to North Carolina, first teaching at UNC-Charlotte and the Penland School of Crafts. From 1979 until 1999 Scarlata taught at Virginia Intermont College in Bristol, Virginia. Since 1999 he has been 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. He uses primarily large format cameras and printing in a variety of photographic media from 19th century antiquarian processes to digital/inkjet output to create a significant and exquisite body of work.

Influenced early in his career by modernist  photographers such as Edward Weston and Minor White, he has since explored the alternative methods of viewing the landscape suggested by the New Topographics photographers of the nineteen seventies, including Lewis Baltz, Robert Adams, and Mark Klett.

Scarlata's images  invoke and evoke nature and man's interventions in the environment exploring complex interrelationships and subtle beauty.  My friend Diana Bloomfield describes the show as "filled with really beautiful, awe-inspiring work," definitely worth the trip to Greenville.

Titus Brooks Heagins -- Show at Meredith College

 

Titus Heagens will have a major show of his work at The Frankie Weems Gallery at Meredith College in Raleigh, opening with an artist's talk at 1 pm on January 31st, 2010, and running through April 4, 2010.

Heagins is a Durham-based photographer who describes himself as an ethno/photographer whose work seeks to document the lives and experiences of people of color, especially those descendants of Africa who are now living in the Western Hemisphere. 

The work in the Meredith show intends to question assumptions of race, gender, sexual orientation, ageism, class and religion with images that confront viewers' perceptions of themselves and move the position of "the other" closer for examination.

Heagins holds an MFA from the School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan. He has exhibited widely in the South and across the country. He has won numerous awards and fellowships and his work is included in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Anacostina Museum of African American Art and History, the Zoeller Galleries of Lehigh University, and the Museum of Arts at North Carolina Central University.

Heagins was recognized as one of North Carolina's most outstanding photographers in 2006 when his work was added to the collection of the North Carolina Museum of Art and included in its exhibition "Contemporary North Carolina Photography from the Museum’s Collection."

Heagins' work possesses stunning clarity of vision and profound insight into the paradoxes of Southern society, the experiences of people of color, and the complexities of relationships among Southerners of all racial and ethnic backgrounds. He is truly a Southern Photographer To Watch Out For.

Shannon Johnstone is Having a Year to Remember

Raleigh, NC based photographer Shannon Johnstone is having a year to remember. Her work has just been accepted into the ONWARD show early in 2010 at Project Basho in Philadelphia.

Earlier this year, her work was accepted for the International Photography Awards Competition, chosen by Henry Horrenstein for the Camera Club of NY National Juried Exhibition, and chosen by Deborah Willis for the NC Photographers Biennial Exhibition. She received Honorable Mention for her work in all these shows.

Johnstone was also named among the top 50 photographers in this year's Critical Mass selection process  run by Photo Lucida. In addition, her work was featured in Visual Overture magazine, including the cover shot in the Winter 2009 issue. She also had work on the cover of the North Carolina Literary Review and in the Slow Exposures show in Pike County, GA, a part of this year's Atlanta Celebrates Photography.

Johnstone teaches photography at Meredith College in Raleigh. She is definitely a Southern Photographer To Watch Out For.

Dan Plunkett Photographs the South

Artists in the South are often working out their relationship to issues that are part of the region's culture and history.  Race is usually a concern, as are women and class and one's parents and the relationship between education and parochialism and four centuries of agony, rage, and oppression. Faulkner said that in the South the past isn't dead; it isn't even past. Being southern can seem a burden, even a curse. I don't know many southerners who really appreciate our history who can live comfortably with it.

This book of  photographs by Dan Plunkett contains work that is in the center of all these issues. Dan has been photographing in the South for a long time; he grew up in Louisiana and has worked as a laborer and has climbed the educational ladder from BA to MA to PhD and the economic ladder to professional success.

Yet Ryan Plunkett, his son, says the work in this book started with photographs of an abandoned sharecropper's shack but really got going when Plunkett photographed his father who had just thrown away a good job and ten years of sobriety for a new Oldsmobile and a week-long drunk.

Ryan says HIS daddy captures an "unquantifiable southern grace" in his photographs, documenting a "delicate mixture of sense and senselessness" that characterizes the South. Dan's father did, too, in his own way, especially the senseless part. Go here to check out Dan's efforts to come to terms with this legacy through his photography.

Art Basel Miami + Art Miami -- Is Miami in the South?

The Art World has come to Miami and Miami Beach for the annual Art Miami and Art Basel Miami Beach shows. And I do mean the Art World. Here is a list of galleries showing work at Art Basel Miami, a list that includes galleries from locales far distant from Miami, ranging from Paris, Munich, and London to NYC, Chicago, and San Francisco.

There is a lot of photography on offer here, much of it inspired, as so much of the fine art photography world seems to be right now, by the German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher and their students and fans, practitioners of typological photography, documentarians of all the ways the same thing can look.

One example of this concern for sameness is the image above, by Robert Volt, shown at Art Miami by the Amador Gallery of NYC. It is one of a series of his images all showing a cell phone tower made to look, sort of, like a tree. Go HERE for nine of his images, all of the same thing, shot under the same light, and composed in exactly the same way. 

Could there be a way of doing typological photography in the South? Given what some have called our interest in human beings and their differences, even the nuances of difference, even eccentricity, as a defining condition of life, is it possible that we are at a defining moment in the concept of southernness in fine art photography?

Has anyone photographed a series of images of all the ways kudzu can take over a landscape? Is it time?