Debbie Fleming Caffery Wins Documentary Photography Award

SlowExposures's blog brings news that Debbie Fleming Caffery, of Breaux Bridge, LA, will receive the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities “Michael P. Smith Documentary Photography Award” on April 2. This award is made each year to honor Louisianians who have made outstanding contributions to the study and understanding of the humanities.

This award is in special recognition of Caffrey's work documenting of rural communities with strong agriculture and religious ties. This work  brought her to the sugarcane fields of Louisiana where she has photographed and documented the last generation of workers to harvest sugarcane by hand. She has also made work documenting Louisiana's distinctive Cajun culture centered in Lafayette, LA and the small towns around it like Breau Bridge, New Iberia, and St Maryville.  She has also been involved in making work documenting the distinctive culture of New Orleans and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the Gulf Oil Spill of last year. 

 

This award also recognizes Caffrey's long and distinguished career as a photographer. Over the course of 30 years, Caffery has had more than 20 one-woman exhibitions at museums and galleries, including the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian, Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, and Galerie Camera Obscura in Paris.

Caffery received a Katrina Media Fellowship from the Open Society in 2006 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005. She was the first recipient of the Lou Stomen prize for documentary photography given by the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, California. Caffery's work is in numerous museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institute, the New Orleans Museum of Art, and the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris.

 

Caffrey also knows that one of the great places to be on a Saturday morning is the Cafe des Amis in Breau Bridge, for the Zydeco Breakfast. Congratulations to Caffrey for this well-deserved honor! 

James R. Holland Documents a Bit of Southern Culture

The excellent blog of the Photographic Resource Center at Boston University brings us a reminder of a book that came out in 2008 to great, and well-earned, acclaim, James R. Holland's Klan Rally: A Photographic Essay. 

Klan Rally won five awards in national book competitions during 2008 and 2009, including recognition as the best book on the history of the United States and best photography book in a competition sponsored by BOOK NEWS/USA.  In 2009 it was a finalist in the Eric Hoffer Book Competition in the Art Category.

Holland is a Boston-based photographer who took the images in this book when he was a photojournalism student at Ohio University fifty years ago. He never published the images, but went on to a long career as a photographer for National Geographic and as a photojournalist in the Boston area.

Holland ran across the images when working on a memoir of his career and recognized their abiding power to show us ourselves at our worst moments.

The images in this book were made at a Klan rally in southwestern Ohio but they document one aspect of the tangled and complex legacy of Southern history. The fact that they were not made in the South is also a reminder that Southern history is also American history, that the burden of our legacy of slavery and racial oppression is a national as well as regional burden.

UPDATE: This story about recent ceusus data represents some of the best news this Southerner has heard in some time.

Jonathan Traviesa Featured on One One Thousand

New Orleans-based photographer Jonathan Traviesa is the latest photographer to be featured in One One Thousand, the on-line magazine of Southern Fine Art Photography.

Traviesa was born in San Francisco but soon moved to the New Orleans area. He studied at the New Orleans Academy of Fine Art (NOAFA) and earned a degree from the University of New Orleans in 2001. Since then he has had numerous solo and group exhibitions in New Orleans, Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York.  He's now on the faculty at NOAFA

Traviesa has been working for years on an ongoing series of  environmental portraits of citizens of New Orleans. His show of work on One One Thousand is drawn from this series, as was his first book, Portraits, with a concurrent exhibition at The Front Gallery during October and November of 2009. 

One One Thousand continues to do an outstanding job of bringing us strong photographs by folks like Jonathan Traviesa. Keep up the good work, folks! 

Herman Mhire at the Martine Chaisson Gallery in New Orleans

There is an intriguing show of work by Lafayette, LA-based photographer Herman Mhire called Altered States up at the Martine Chaisson Gallery at 727 Camp Street in New Orleans, through April 23rd, 2011.

This show presents an extended series of surreal large format portraits of Louisiana artists in which Mhire carries out extensive manipulations of the images to explore ideas of portraiture, the photographic medium, and psychology.  Images from this show can be found here.

Mnire says he sets out in this work to "transform photographic portraits into provocative and often disturbing hyperfaces that invite the viewer to search for clues about the altered states of my fictional characters.”

Mhire got to know the artists whose images for the basis of these manipulated portraits through his work as the Distinguished Professor of Visual Arts in the College of the Arts and Director/Chief Curator of the Paul and Lulu Hilliard University Art Museum at the University of Louisiana, in Lafayette.

There is a review of this show here.  Mhire has shown this work earlier at the Acadiana Center for the Arts and Galerie Eclaireuse in Lafayette, LA.

Although I tend not to be a big fan of obvious digital manipulation, these images are so outrageously manipulated that they are visually compelling and well worth thoughtful attention.

Jack Spencer at Rebekah Jacob Gallery

Nashville-based photographer Jack Spencer has a show of large color prints up at the Rebekah Jacob Gallery in Charleston, SC, up through March of 2011, in a show of work from Jack's portfolio This Land.

I had the privilege of seeing this work earlier this week. Jack's mastery of light and color in these images makes for haunting, powerful landscapes that draw the viewer in, deeper and deeper, into Southern landscapes of field and forest, of dirt roads that lead the eye back into the woods where sunlight plays across clearings, of marshlands and seascapes and rolling hills.

What Jack really nails in these images is the play of light across the Southern landscape. He's definitely a Southern Photographer We Watch Out For, and we were delighted to see his work in person.

The Internet is great for photography, folks, but there is no substitute for seeing the real image, printed out, on the wall, and in person.

By all means, check out this show if you are in Charleston. While you are at it, get to know the Rebekah Jacob Gallery, a gem among the crowded gallery scene in Charleston.