Southern Photography at the Ogden Museum in New Orleans

The Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans has a show up now and another show opening at the end of October that are definitely of interest to Southern photographers.

The show currently up is of work by Mississippi-based photographer Briney Imes in a portfolio called Whispering Pines, a collection of black and white and color photographs taken over two decades in and around a café and bar in the Mississippi prairie.

This establishment -- and its owner and clientele -- apparently were all colorful and crusty and engaging, just the way you would want a bar to be in rural Mississippi. In this body of work, Imes documents the place and its colorful proprietor and patrons from the mid-1970s until the café closed in the early 1990s.

The show upcoming at the Ogden -- and opening October 31st -- is called Photographs from the Permanent Collection of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art.

Photographs in this show, we are told, "provide a visual narrative of the ever-changing American South – the nineteenth century, the Great Depression, the civil rights movement and the emergence of the New South" Photographers whose work is in the show include E. J. Bellocq, Walker Evans, Elliot Erwitt, William Christenberry, and, as they say, "many more." 

This show is up through January 3rd, 2012, at the Ogden Museum,at 925 Camp Street, in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Jessica Ingram in One One Thousand

The latest Southern photographer to be featured in One One Thousand is Nashville (and Oakland, California) based photographer Jessica Ingram. Not quite sure how Ingram conducts a bi coastal career, but the work is good, so let that pass.

Ingram's portfolio is called Waiting for a Sign, and its about one of those great Southern topics of perennial interest, the family, or, better, one's own family. They are also about the experience of leaving home, putting distance between oneself and one's past, and then seeing if Thomas Wolfe was right about going home.

Ingram, perhaps from the perspective of California, or from the perspective of the journey that has taken her from the South to California, goes home to Grandma, and to signs, and to the rituals of Southern white working class life in gardens and funerals and churches and pathways and trailer parks.

Ingram says of her images that they are about "the division and closeness that exists simultaneously between family members," and are part of an effort "to reconnect with family members I felt distanced from," but they turned out to be about separation as well, about "complex family relationships and attempts to understand the point at which individuals who are related and connected in so many ways eventually separate."

The title of the portfolio comes from a sign about signs, like Magritte's painting of a pipe that carries the reminder that this sign is not a pipe, except the image here is of a sign that says that, unlike Magritte's pipe it is what it is and, "If you are looking for a sign, here it is."

Here the overtone is of course religious, an echo of evangelical Christianity's word play with Jesus and signs. Although I've often wondered, if Jesus is the answer, what is the question. The folks who made the sign in Ingram's image were confident they knew what the question was, and what this sign is a sign of, but it's clear Ingram isn't quite so sure.

Images here treat people but also roads and signs, or as Ingram puts it, "I am interested in the spaces in between; roads I travel connecting me to members of the family, but also the space and relation of family members to one another. These spaces are so intimate and so familiar, yet often so hard to fit into."

So these images turn out to be about making images that help one "understand the history of my family," here  the themes extend farther than the personal narrative. There is a greater narrative about the powerful nature of religious belief, and the rifts that can result, but also the strong pull to one another that can exist in families. There is a great expectation when a family is started, or expanded, and then eventually, there is a desire, even desperation, to hold onto what is being lost."

Images of course hold on, but distance. Granma (image at the top) here looks not at the camera but to where only she is going, quickly, across the frame, a little ahead of the photographer's attention.

Ingram here draws our attention to the making of this work as well as to the subjects she chooses to frame. There is a strongly personal flavor to this work, yet I suspect it will have strong resonance for those of us who grew up in similar Christ-haunted landscapes.

One One Thousand has edited Ingram's portfolio down to 15 images from the 25 that are on her website under the fuller name If You Are Waiting For a Sign, Here It Is. There may be a conversation here between the two versions of her portfolio. In any case, this is work worthy of our attention.

Center for Documentary Studies Announces 2011 Daylight/CDS Photo Awards

Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies and Daylight Magazine partner each year to make awards for photography grounded in the documentary tradition.

This year's winners have been announced, and you can see their work up at CDS in Durham through December 22nd, at the Center for Documentary Studies,1317 W. Pettigrew Street, in Durham (directions here) and in an online story here.

There is even more of their work here.

The winner for best project is Tamas Dezsos, with Jury Picks in this category also going to Kris Vervaeke, Sebastian Liste, and John Cyr.

The winner for best Work-in-Process is David Pace, with Jury Picks in this category going to Baldomero Fernandez, James Dodd, Lydia Goldblatt, Lorenzo Martelli, and Shane Lavalette.

These folks are from all over the place (literally, with home sites ranging from NYC to Italy to Spain to Singapore), though none are actually from the American South.

The local connections, though, are several. One, that CDS is now a cultural center of sufficient renown to draw entries from all over the world to its competition.

Two, that, especially, the works of Baldomero Fernandez remind us that the rural South is now exceptionally difficult to distinguish from generic rural America.

And three, that one of the winners is Shane Lavalette, who we know is spending the year roaming our region and photographing us for the High Museum in Atlanta.

Congratulations to CDS for identifying a fine array of photographers and bringing their work to Durham.

ACP in Full Swing

The annual Atlanta Celebrates Photography Festival is now in full swing, with shows up all over Atlanta and in neighboring towns in museums and galleries and restaurants, with talks and receptions, and lectures, and the portfolio review, and more, and more, and more.

To find out what's happening, there is the on-line version of the Guide, here.

There is also a preview from BurnAway Magazine, here.

There is also ACP's own FaceBook page here, and blog, here.

There are mainly lots of splendid and challenging and engaging and disturbing photographs to see. People I know either in person or through this blog have work up, like my friend Titus Heagins (image above) who has work in a show at the Arnika Dawkins Gallery called Black & White and Color, opening October 14th with a reception from 6-8 pm.

Titus also has a new website, here, so check that out, too. 

I will be down for a look atACP in a couple of weeks, but in the meantime I will try to experience ACP vicariously through blogs and online versions of shows and first-person accounts that filter this way.

Keep 'em coming, folks.

Anderson Documents New Orleans in One One Thousand

One One Thousand is continuing its series featuring photographers coming to terms with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, this time with a portfolio of images called One Block by Little Rock, Arkansas photographer Dave Anderson.

Anderson's portfolio is the result of his photographing in a single block of the Holy Cross section of New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward repeatedly over a period of two and a half years.

Anderson says his goal with this series was to learn, post-Katrina,"to follow both the obvious physical rebuilding of the homes as well as the evolving psychological state of the residents."

His central question in his work was posed in response to a comment by a resident of the city, who said, "You just wanna be home." Anderson wondered, "Doesn't everyone? Would they ever be? Would that thing, whatever it was, that was so uniquely New Orleans return, dissipate or transform into something completely different?

"And what about the thousands of small communities that existed within the city — would they survive, or even flourish? What was lost was clear, but what could be recovered was not at all clear."

What is clear is that Anderson offers us in this portfolio a set of strong, haunting, even haunted images. The people in them seem themselves to be haunted, by what they have been through, by what has been lost, perhaps by the struggle already required to regain a small semblance of order, of balance, of a future to look forward to.

These folks have earned our honor and respect, and Anderson's work deserves our thoughtful attention.