Chuck Hemard to show work at Opal Gallery

Georgia-based photographer Chuck Hemard will have a show of his work at Atlanta's Opal Gallery this year. This follows up on his participation in the New Southern Photography show earlier this year at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans.

Chuck is a native of New Orleans but grew up in Hattiesburg, MS. He received his MFA in photography from the University of Georgia in 2004 and now teaches photography at Auburn University. His work has been exhibited nationally and extensively throughout the Southeast US including the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia in Atlanta, Opal Gallery in Atlanta, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans, Columbus Museum in Columbus, Georgia, Mobile Museum of Art, as well as the Appleton Museum of Art in Ocala, Florida.

Chuck's subject throughout his several portfolios is what we might call the New South, but he is especially interested in the pain of transition, in the cost of change, in the signs on the Southern landscape that mark what is happening to older notions of home, to the Southern illusion of stasis, of things remaining the same.

Chuck operates in the tradition of landscape photography but attends especially to the places where human actions impinge upon the natural setting. One of his portfolios, for example, documents the ways construction of interstate highways disrupts or confronts or nestles inside the world it cuts across by looking at what the reviewer Jonathan Bouknight has called "the strange no-mans land between interstates and exit ramps."

Chuck is good at capturing the concept of "the new South" visually, showing us Atlanta, for example, in Jonathan's words, as a "city of tombstones butted against interstates," whose charm comes from the  "cranes [that] populate the skyline and the slightly toxic river [that] runs through it."

Much of the kind of work Chuck does might, in the hands of a less skillful or insightful photographer, be labeled merely banal, a lifting up of the prosaic and the ordinary. But Chuck's work documents the necessary but still painful reality of loss, of giving up the familiar in favor of the culture that is not yet, but is still being born. Chuck is definitely a Southern Photographer to Watch Out For.

Jane Robbins Kerr is part of Southern Memories Show

Photographs by Georgia photographer Jane Robbins Kerr are featured in the special exhibition Southern Memories, organized by John Bennette at this year's SlowExposures photography festival in Pike County, Georgia. 

The show, up in the Whiskey Bonding Barn in Molena, Georgia, includes work by a number of Southern photographers, including in addition to Kerr, Raymond Adams, William Boling, Sheila Pree Bright, William A. Chambers, Brenda Fayard, William Gilliespie, Rob Hann, Jessica Hines, Joanna Knox, Kendall Messick, Donna Rosser, Anderson Scott, Jerry Siegel, David Simonton, Jo Lynn Still, Gordon Settinius, Colton Vincent, and Hai Zhang. 

Bennette says of Kerr that she "burns with a passion to make pictures and to tell stories with them," making "small black and white photographs that make you aware of the basic language of structures," that are "simple, almost naive, as if a child had drew them. You recognize them; they reassure."

Luceo Images Featured in NY Times

We've featured Atlanta-based Luceo Images before on Southern Photography, but today they are featured in the New York Times in their LENS blog, with a well-deserved story complementing the folks at Luceo on their skills, talent, and organizational and marketing ability.

Luceo Images describes itself as "a photographer owned and operated cooperative established with the goal of supporting the significant work of its members. Luceo produces the highest quality commercial and editorial photography and works to provide creative nourishment to our member photographers."

Its really 6 guys and a neat website -- David Walter Banks, Kendrick Brinson, Matt Eich (also previously featured on Southern Photography), Kevin German, Daryl Peveto, and Matt Slaby -- and some fine, fine photography. 

James Estrin of the NY Times says that "Luceo Images is a vibrant rebuttal to the notion floated by Neil Burgess that photojournalism died last month.” Way to go, you guys!

Lydia Anne McCarthy wins Conscientious Portfolio Competition

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.

Shawn Rocco at SPARKcom

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.