SlowExposures featured in The New Yorker

SlowExposures is featured in this week's New Yorker online photography blog Photo Booth.

The New Yorker's Elizabeth Biondi traveled to Pike County, Georgia for the opening weekend and had a wonderful time. She came back with good words for everyone, and includes images from the show, and from John Bennette's Southern Memories show, on the blog. She enjoyed "the Southern conviviality and hospitality [that] create an ambiance that is most of all creative and communicative."

Elizabeth says she "learned to pronounce the word “kudzu” properly, ate a lot of Southern food, met many talented photographers, saw tons of very good work, and fell in love with a number of photographs, especially Jessica Hines’s quirky boat picture."

"Most important," Elizabeth says, "the photographs helped me understand Southern ways a little better than I did before."

You go, girl.

David Simonton in Southern Memories Show

Photographs by Raleigh, NC photographer David Simonton are featured in the special exhibition Southern Memories, organized by John Bennette at this year's SlowExposures photography festival in Pike County, Georgia.You can read John's comments about David's work if you go to the SlowExposures blog, here.

Simonton, a native of New York who grew up in New Jersey and moved to North Carolina in 1989, quickly turned his artistic gaze on his adopted home.  Noticing that North Carolina is primarily a state of small towns, he has documented over 350 of its towns and rural communities. 

Bennette says Simonton shows us "the small southern towns we hear about and dread." But I don't think that's right. I think David shows us the small Southern towns we live in, in a South that is perpetually in transition. 

Simonton pays particular attention to the Southern townscape in moments of this transition, from day to night, from rural to urban, from old to new. He helps us redefine Faulkner's old remark that in the South the past isn't dead; it isn't even past. In Simonton's images of the South, the past is present but in the moment of its passing, so we see not only what remains but the condition of how it remains with us. 

Simonton is widely recognized for his photography. His portfolio is among the work of a small group of North Carolina photographers in the permanent collection of the NC Museum of Art, along with John Menapace, Elizabeth Matheson, Caroline Vaughan, and others.

Simonton has also taught photography at NC State University and Peace College, both in Raleigh.

Among his many awards is the Juror's Award in the 12th Annual Center Awards Exhibition, sponsored by the Center for Photographic Art in Carmel, California, for his "originality of expression, strong guiding idea, skillful use of the chosen photographic materials, personal integrity, and relevance to our own times." He has also twice been named recipient of the Visual Artist Fellowships from the North Carolina Arts Council (2000, 2008).

Simonton is well-included in John Bennette's show. He is definitely a Southern Photographer We Admire.

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!