Slow Exposures 2010 Opens September 17th in Concord, Georgia

SlowExposures, nominally a part of the annual Atlanta Celebrates Photography festival, is rapidly becoming a photography festival in its own right, with several satellite exhibitions in addition to the main exhibition, as well as a Portfolio Review, a Salon on the state of fine art photography, a Jurors Talk, an opening dinner/reception, and the SlowExposures Ball. 

This year's edition opens on Friday, September 17th and runs through Sunday, Sep 26th, with the main show in the R. F. Strickland Center on Main Street in Concord, Georgia.

This, the eighth Slow Exposures show, includes the work of over 40 photographers whose work was accepted by jurors Brett Levine and Jack Spencer because in their view it "underscores the contradictions and complexity of the rural South." Levine and Spencer will discuss their choices in a Jurors Talk scheduled for Sunday, Sepember 19th, at 11am in the Strickland Center. 

In addition to the main show, there will be a show of student work as well as satellite shows of work by Diane Kirkland (at A Novel Experience in Zebulon, Georgia) and Malgorzata Florkowska entitled The Joy of Farming (at J. Michael's in Griffin, Georgia).

Guest Curator John Bennette has also organized a show of work from Southern photographers entitled Southern Memories: Inside Out that also opens on Friday, September 17th, to be housed in the Whiskey Bonding Barn in Molena, Georgia.

The Bonding Barn will also be the site of a Photography Salon on Sunday, September 19th, from 1-4 pm, featuring

John Bennette, Tony Casadonte, Gary Gruby and Rob McDonald in conversation on the business of fine art photography.

 Pike County is only an hour south of Atlanta, but it might as well be in another world. The folks who operate Slow Exposures really know how to show Southern hospitality. This is an occasion not to be missed.

Laura Noel Portfolo on Texas Photographic Society Site

Atlanta-based photographer Laura Noel recently won a portfolio competition for mid-career photographers sponsored by the Texas Photographic Society. Her work is now online at the Texas Photographic Society website.

The Texas Photographic Society is a major web-based resource for photographers inside and outside Texas, both for its hosting of information about photography across the country and also for the many competitions it hosts or sponsors each year.

Laura's portfolio of images on the TPS site is hauntingly elegiac, focusing on a modest suburban ranch house which Laura once shared with her former husband, a place Laura says that serves for her as "a repository for all the emotions and failures and successes and bits of everyday life and larger aspirations we either shared with each other or scorned."

The images in this portfolio were made as her husband and then she and her son moved out of this house in 2006.

Laura says that these "images are meant to be an elegy for the end of the relationship, but hopefully the photographs capture the greater process of loss and recovery everyone experiences at some point."

Congratulations to Laura for her powerful and personal work, and for winning this competition.

Shameless Self-Promotion: My Show at Meredith College

I'm having a show of my photographs, opening September 12th, in the Rotunda Gallery of Johnson Hall at Meredith College, in Raleigh, with the title "Living in the Gaze."

The show is up in the Rotunda Gallery in Johnson Hall on the Meredith campus until November 14th.

This work explores the commercial street as a theater, where we perform for each other our roles as men and women. Its about image and gender and commerce, or as Eliot put it, its about the faces we prepare to meet the faces that we meet.

I hope you, gentle readers of this blog, can make it to the reception or get to see the show before it comes down in mid-November. If not, you can see the show on-line if you go here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jnwallphoto/sets/72157624591947917/

In either case, let me know what you think.

Some of these images were made in the South. Many were not. What I think is Southern about them is an awareness I have from my Southern background of life as a kind of performance art. Part of being Southern is inheriting roles and costumes along with the history and the weather. After all, the difference between Scarlett O'Hara and Lady Gaga is a matter of degree, not kind.

The photographer is a part of the drama of performance as both audience and participant. We play our roles as artists as others play their roles as gendered people, as consumers, as embodiments of desire.

Now, that's done. I feel better. Now, back to keeping up with the REALLY important Southern photographers . . .

Christenberry, Eggleston at Princeton

Distinguished Southern photographers William Eggleston and William Christenberry both have work in a group show entitled Starburst: Color Photography in America 1970–1980 now up at the Princeton University Art Museum through September 26th. Work by Harry Callahan, who spent a number of years in Atlanta at the end of his career, is also included.

This show is curated by Kevin Moore and claims to be 'the first historical survey of what critics of the 1970s dubbed “The New Color Photography.” It includes the work of 18 photographers "who embraced color despite, or precisely for, its seeming artlessness." 

Moore writes that while "the duality inherent in black-and-white made it ideal for diagramming intense feelings (hope vs. gloom, righteous vs. evil, ugly vs. beautiful), color’s equanimity gave artists a way to explore the ambivalent mood of a decade trailing the heels of the Sixties: an era of collapsed ideals, disappointed hopes, upended social values, and unsettled sexual politics."

Good to see Southern pioneers of color photography getting their due recognition in this show.

Karen Shacham Shows Couples in Atlanta

Atlanta photographer Karen Shacham has a show of her work up now through August 27th in the Dewberry Gallery of the Savannah College of Art and Design in its Atlanta campus, at 1545 Peachtree Street.

This is Karen's MFA show, and it includes a large number of photographs done in traditional family portrait style of gay, lesbian, and transgendered couples. The backgrounds of many of these images are so ordinary that one suspects Karen borrowed them from the Olan Mills Studio at the Mall in Peachtree City.

But this sense of the ordinary is part of what Karen is about here, in the age of growing social comfort with same-sex relationships and the acceptance of gay marriage. Karen says in her project statement that it is the "love between these people [that] is the overarching symbol" in her photographs, not their being of the same gender.

Several of the couples shown in Karen's work are of different races, a fact that gives this body of work an extra dimension of interest regarding the exploration of sameness and difference in the realm of desire.

Both this dimension of Karen's work, AND the fact that she doesn't mention it in her account of her work serve as reminders of how different the South of today is from the South of my youth. After all, mixed race marriages were only made legal in the South through a Supreme Court decision handed down in 1967.