Chapel Hill photographer Lydia Anne McCarthy is one of this year's winners of the portfolio competition conducted by Joerg Colberg on his popular Conscientious website. McCarthy's Refraction portfolio was chosen especially by Elisabeth Biondi, the photography editor of the New Yorker Magazine.
McCarthy is from Massachusetts but chose to move to Chapel Hill to enroll in UNC's MFA program in studio art. One might wonder in what sense this work is Southern, but when I look at these images made by photographing people through a fresnel lens, I immediately think of the harshness and merciless intensity of Southern light in the summertime.
Congratulations to McCarthy, and to UNC for becoming an attractive school for fine art photographers from across the country.
Raleigh photographer Shawn Rocco has work in this year's photography show in SPARKcon, Raleigh's festival of creativity and the arts, running September 16-19 in various venues in downtown Raleigh.
Shawn is a staff photographer for Raleigh's News & Observer who has been getting lots of notice and a whole slew of awards with images he makes with his Motorola E815 cellphone camera, which he describes as "the Kodak Brownie of the digital age." You can learn more about this series, which he calls cellular obscura, if you visit his blog.
Shawn deserves even wider recognition for recognizing the potential of this medium to produce images that have a haunting quality, a result of the specific tonal range and imaging process of this at-once humble and yet powerful camera, at least when its at the service of Shawn's talented eye.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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 . . .
Posts
