Charleston for Thanksgiving

We were in Charleston for Thanksgiving, and had the pleasure of looking in on a major photography show at the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, SC, called Masters in Photography, which will be up through January 8th, 2012.

The Gibbes' account of this show says that it "features twentieth-century, masters of photography selected from the Gibbes permanent collection and local private collections including works by Alfred Stieglitz, Margaret Bourke-White, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Berenice Abbott, and many more."

There are some of these big names' greatest hit images in the show, but what is even more engaging are the number of images in the show made by major photographers who did work in Charleston and the surrounding area. Works on exhibition include an image by Robert Rauschenberg (who knew he was a photographer as well as painter?) as well as images by Walker Evans and other WPA photographers who worked in the Charleston area as well as lsewhere in the South.

Also, there is a show up at the Gibbes called Breaking Down Barriers: 300 Years of Women in Art, which includes work by a number of women photographers like Margaret Bourke-White, and color photographs by Sally Mann (again, who knew?). 

We were also able to stop into the wonderful gallery run by Rebekah Jacob, at 169-B King Street, in downtown Charleston. Rebekah often (usually) has the work of Southern photographers on display, but right now she has up an elegant show of meditative landscapes by Seattle-based photographer Michael Kenna (see example above).

Rebekkah's gallery is an oasis of calm amid the hustle of busy downtown Charleston. It is one of the key places for getting to know the current renaissance of photography in the American South.

When you are in Charleston, a visit to the Rebekah Jacob Gallery is definitely in order.

December Issue of SXSE -- on the Mississippi Delta -- is Now Available

The December 2011 issue of South x Southeast (or SXSE, as their friends call 'em) is now out, and it's an issue featuring, but not exclusively devoted to, the Mississippi Delta. There's a lot of New Orleans here, too, as well as Mr. Bennette's choice of Southern snowfall photographs.

This issue includes work by photographers familiar to readers of this blog, including Nell Dickerson, Debbie Fleming Caffery, and Magdalena Sole plus some new folks well worthy of our attention, like Will Steacy, Terri Garland, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and Dave Anderson.

Especially affecting are the portraits of Bibles rescued from flooded churches in the Central City and Lower Ninth Ward areas of New Orleans (see above).

In short, just what one would want from an e-zine of Southeastern photography in December.

You've got to subscribe to experience it all, but its a thriving operation and one truly worthy of your support.

Interesting NY Times Piece on Institutional Depictions of the Civil War

There is a really interesting essay in today's NY Times about how museums in the South display artifacts and tell the story of the Civil War. Go HERE.

Edward Rothstein, the author, visited two museums in Richmond -- the Museum of the Confederacy and the Museum of the Virginia Historical Society -- and concludes that while in the North, memories of the Civil War are at heart institutional, in the South the War is remembered in personal terms. 

Rothstein also concludes that there remains a conflict in Southern institutional memory between lingering white Southern grief, anger, and loss on the one hand and modern ethical judgments about the "Lost Cause" for which so many Southerners died.

He poses a final question, "How are loyalties to Southern culture to be reconciled with the evils of one of its fundamental institutions?"

The points he makes are deeply relevant to anyone who seeks to imagine the South, or to make sense of our history and culture through images. (Like Kathleen Robbins, see image above)

Openings and Events for December -- Vrba, SCOPE, Art Basil Miami, PhotoNOLA, me

December 2011 is already shaping up to be a banner month for photographers in the South.

Chapel Hill-based photographer Lori Vrba, who has already been having a splendid year in her photography career, is now opening a major show at the Jennifer Schwartz Gallery, at 1000 Marietta Street, in Atlanta, this Friday, December 3rd, with a reception from 6-9 pm.

The show is called Southern Comfort, and includes images (such as the one above) and an installation, and Jennifer Schwartz promises it will be "like nothing you've ever seen before." She promises to have a video of the event to share later on this season.

That's before she and Vrba hit the road in their newly-funded bus.

Also opening or about to open across the South are a number of fairs, festivals, and the like, including SCOPE, through December 4th, in Miami, an umbrella event with lots of photography galleries involved, including the Aperture Foundation, Light Work, and others (full list here).

Also in Miami is Art Basil Miami Beach, through this weekend, with the work of over 600 artists on exhibition (go here for a full list), including Sally Mann and a slew of other major photographers.

PhotoNOLA is about to crank up in New Orleans, starting on December 8th and running through the 11th.

More on that later. But, finally, for right now, I will have a small number of pieces in a group show this month at the Exchange Gallery at Raleigh's Visual Art Exchange, opening Friday, December 3rd, Raleigh's First Friday, with a reception from 6-9 at the Visual Art Exchange in its new location at 309 West Martin Street in downtown Raleigh, near our new Contemporary Art Museum (CAM).

Aaron Blum, or the Problem of West Virginia

The West Virginia-based photographer Aaron Blum is currently featured on Joerg Colberg's blog Conscientious with links to a fascinating portfolio of work called Born and Raised: Reflections of a World Set Aside, about the experience of living in West Virginia.

I highly recommend having a look at this work. It is strong work, and I am grateful to Joerg for bringing it to our attention.

Blum's work -- along with the way Blum talks about it -- raises questions of identity similar to questions one could raise about Florida or west Texas, in relationship to the American South.

Blum thinks of himself as living in a distinctive region of the country, in part definable as Appalachia.

There is of course lots of Appalachia in the South, and it has a distinctive cultural character that contributes to our overall identity as Southerners.

One can hardly imagine, for example, today's South without the music of Appalachia, without bluegrass or without Nashville or Memphis, where the music of Appalachia met the music of the Mississippi Delta.

There is also the issue of how a region is viewed.

Blum writes, on his website, that "Outsiders have long fictionalized the narrative surrounding Appalachia. As a resident of West Virginia I have always been aware of the views others hold of my home, and they have guided me to create my own version of life in the hills. My Appalachia is a granulated depiction based on the false impressions of others, my idealizations and personal experiences."

Blum also thinks of West Virginia as a land where "Light plays an important role," a place where a "warm southern sun creates a glow that pours over the mountains, rivers and forests creating long shadows, dark recesses and gray mists that blanket the landscape."

A warm southern sun -- Blum's sense of identity as a West Virginia photographer looks eastward to Virginia and southward, toward Kentucky and Tennessee and North Carolina. He is thinking of himself as a Southern photographer, or at least a photographer of the South.

Part of the purpose of an Artist's Statement is to direct the viewer's attention, to take a shot at establishing the terms of the conversation that will commence about one's work.

For Blum, the light of a southern sun has a "unique quality" that "is inherent to the hills and provides a catalyst to the imagination- a backdrop that becomes both magnificent and eerie. It is its own character within my story of Appalachia."

This brings us to the question of identity, especially of a Southern identity. Is it the light? Or the history?

When I set up this blog, I gambled on history, by deliberately including the states of the old Confederacy, even though I knew that subsequent events had given to places like Florida and west Texas an identity and a culture significantly different from the southeastern states.

West Virginia was created to have a history different from the history of Virginia at the defining moment of Southern history, so I've not regarded it as a Southern state.

I wonder what our friends over at SXSE think about this question.