UPDATED -- Stacy Kranitz is Having a Wonderful 2015, and Its Only October

Stacy Kranitz, who works a lot in the Appalachian areas of the American South, is having a wonderful 2015, and its only October.

1. Kranitz has work from her As It Was Give(n) to Me portfolio in Diffusion: the Cardiff International Photography Festival, in Cardiff, Wales, now up through the month of October, go here.

Kranitz -- and the questions her work raises about how photographers can be true to their experience, and to their vision as artists, when their work draws attention to aspects of life that some members of their audience would rather not be reminded of -- has been featured by Sean O'Hanigan in London's Guardian newspaper, here.

2. Kranitz also has work from her Jerimy portfolio as part of the Independent Photography Festival in downtown Los Angeles.  

3. Kranitz also has work in the first volume of Heavy, a publication from the The Heavy Collective. You can buy your own copy of Heavy: Volume One here.

4. Kranitz will also take part in the Looking for America Symposium at the Cardif Photography Festival, on Friday, October 30th,2015.

5. Kranitz will also discuss her life and work with Colin Pantall at IC VISUAL LAB in Bristol, UK (not Tennessee). 

6. You can hear Kranitz discuss her work in a podcast for Filmmaker Magazine, with Elaine Sheldon and Sarah Ginsburg, available here:
 

Listen to the episode

You can also read the article in Filmmaker Magazine, here:

Filmmaker Magazine article 

7. Kranitz has also been the subject of a review and discussion by Kate Fowler, in American Suburb X online magazine, go here:

Interrogating the Notion of Documentary Truth

8. Finally, Kranitz' work is frequently featured in the online magazine VICE, go here, and here, and here, for example, all work from 2015. 

And its only October. Who knows what else the year will bring?

SlowExposures Receives Georgia Governor's Award

SlowExposures, the quintessentially Southern photography show and festival, has been bringing the world of Southern fine art photography to Pike County, Georgia for over thirteen years. 

SlowExposures has been celebrated throughout the fine art photography world, and now has been recognized for its outstanding contributions to life in the American South by being awarded one of the 2015 Governor's Awards for the Arts and Humanities. 

This award is presented by the Office of the Governor of Georgia in partnership with Georgia Council for the Arts and Georgia Humanities and recognizes "outstanding individuals and organizations that have made significant contributions to Georgia's civic and cultural vitality through excellence and service to the arts and humanities." 

Soon, the folks at Georgia's Council for the Arts and Humanities will get more information about SlowExposures and all the other winners of this award for this year on their website, here.

In the meantime, heartiest congratulations to Chris Curry and all the folks in Pike County for their vision, perseverance, and energy in sponsoring SlowExposures and supporting it as it has grown and developed over the years.

SlowExposures is a gift to all of us.  Long may it thrive!

WPA Photographs Made Accessible to All

Yale University has now gone live with a new website that gives us easy access to the more than 170,000 photographs of the United States made by Farm Service Administration photographers between 1935 and 1945. 

Called Photogrammar, this site enables you to zoom into any part of the USA, and on a county-by county or specific-location-by-specific-location basis you can explore this vast collection of Depression- and World War II-era photographs. 

The site is also searchable by photographer as well as geographic location, which makes it easy to find the image above, made by Marion Post Wolcott in 1938, near Wadesboro, NC, where I was born seven years after Wolcott took this picture.

You can also find quickly the complete bodies of work done for the Works Progress Administration by Walker Evans or Dorothea Lange.

Or the photograph below, made by an unknown photographer near Wadesboro in 1941, of a Jeep crossing rough terrain pulling a thirty-seven millimeter anti-tank gun during maneuvers in preparation for America's entry in World War II. 

I remember my father -- an inveterate collector of cast-off stuff -- showing me various bits and pieces of military gear he collected when it was left behind by soldiers on these maneuvers.

 The Yale site makes all this work more accessible than it is on the Library of Congress website. 

The advantage of the Library of Congress site is that you can download high resolution files of these images, so you can print yourself your own copy of Lange's Migrant Mother or any of the other images from these folks in this era of their work. 

Many of the iconic images of the American South -- as well as many just as powerful but less well known -- await our discovery on Photogrammar -- check it out!

Sally Mann in Rome

Distinguished Southern Photographer Sally Mann is scheduled to read from her recently published memoir Hold Still at the American Academy in Rome on Wednesday, October 7th, 2015 at 6:00 pm, Rome time. 

Mann's reading is in celebration of the opening of an exhibition of Cy Twombly's photographs (see image above) at the Academy, a show that remains on view until November 22nd, 2015. 

Born, as was Mann, in Lexington, VA, and best known as a painter, Twombly made photographs throughout his career. His Time in the South included studying at Washington and Lee University in Virginia and Black Mountain College in North Carolina.

Twombly received a grant from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in the early 1950's which enabled him to travel to North Africa, Spain, Italy, and France. Twombly later taught at the Southern Seminary and Junior College in Buena Vista, Virginia, now known as Southern Virginia University.

In this reading, Mann will explore her own relationship with Twombly and their shared romance with the American South, specifically their love for the landscapes of their hometown Lexington, Virginia. 

Mann's reading will be followed by a conversation with curator Peter Benson Miller, Andrew Heiskell Arts Director at the American Academy in Rome.

For more on the exhibition of Cy Twombly's photographs at the American Academy in Rome, go here.

If you are in Rome on October 7th, this is a not-to-be-missed event.  Please let me know how it goes so I can post a full report to this blog. 
 

UPDATED -- Is Steve McCurry a Southern Photographer?

OK, I've now gotten my copy of Paul Theroux's Deep South. Jack Hitt, reviewing this book for the Washington Post, pretty much nails it when he says that Theroux maintains a "posture of exalted condescension" all the way through, while piling on cliche after cliche as though he were discovering them for the first time.  

I feel a bit sad for McCurry, however. His images get shoved off to the end of the book. They get printed small. The paper they are printed on doesn't really show off the color very well.

But I seen nothing in this work to change my mind -- while Steve McCurry is undoubtedly one of the great travel photographers of our time, he is not a Southern photographer.

But there is hope -- it turns out that McCurry's parents were natives of Georgia and South Carolina, and that as a child he spent time each summer in Anderson, SC. So I hope he comes back, on his own time, and on his own dime.

If he could work out from under Theroux's editorial agenda, he might prove himself worthy after all.

His work made, chiefly, in Asia, and published in magazines, especially National Geographic, and in numerous books, has made him widely known and celebrated as a photographer.

The image immediately above, for example, though usually seen in a slightly different crop, is one of the most-seen images of recent photographic history.

McCurry is a master of light, a genius at portraiture, and a whiz at capturing what -- at least to us in the West -- seems to be, all at once, real insight into the souls of people radically different from us and a glimpse of the humanity that we all share. 

Now, he's teamed up with renowned travel writer Paul Theroux for a turn in the American South. 

Their book, Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads, is due out the 29th of September.

Any final estimation of what they have brought us depends of course on seeing the finished product (my copy is on order), but I think we can get the flavor of the book from an essay Theroux wrote for Smithsonian magazine, here, illustrated by some of McCurry's photographs.  

  
On the basis of this sample, however, I think McCurry's work for Theroux's project raises serious issues about the work of the photographer, and his audience, and the purpose of his enterprise. 

The conceptual structure of Theroux's book is, apparently an ongoing comparison between the poorest sections of the American South and the Third-World countries where he has made his name as a travel writer. 

Theroux says he deliberately traveled the back roads of the South, from North Carolina to South Carolina, and on through Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Arkansas, searching for the stories of folks “poorer in their way (as I was to find) and less able to manage and more hopeless than many people I had traveled among in distressed parts of Africa and Asia.”

McCurry, like Theroux, made his reputation by working in Third-World countries. 

Based on an admittedly partial and superficial review of McCurry's work in this volume, however, I will have to say that while his work in the American South is certainly professional -- strong, well-seen, skilled in lighting and composition -- it is not as compelling, not nearly as personal, as engaging to the eye and to the imagination, as close to its subjects, as the work he's done with which we are more familiar.

McCurry's images indicate that his South is a much duller, more barren, less interesting place than his India, his Afghanistan, his Tibet, or even -- to leave his images of the Third World behind for a moment -- his Italy or his Los Angeles.

They are also formulaic and derivative -- I can think of any number of Southern photographers who have made the Barber Shop photo, or the Abandoned Gas Station photo, or the Small Town Boarded Up Building photo, or the Church Service shot.  

Speaking of derivative, McCurry's image of a statue in the back yard of what looks like an abandoned house is clearly a descendant of the photograph of the cemetery monument in Savannah, GA, already seen by thousands upon thousands of readers of John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. 

We, of course, since we are Southerners, know that the American South is always potentially a source of images charged with color, energy, and the work of vigorous and creative human beings. 

This, in spite of, or maybe alongside of, the fact, that the American South is now simultaneously booming in its urban areas and along its interstate highways, but very much struggling to escape the Great Depression, not to mention the Great Recession, in towns and rural areas only a few miles away from

You can't get by in this business without drawing criticism from someone.  McCurry's images of Asia have been justly criticized as catering to Orientalism, to Western desires for images of an exoticized Asia, a kind of alternative world that is more the expression of Western fantasies about Asia than it is a depiction of Asian realities. 

Since I've been there, I can say that not all of India looks like the world we get in McCurry's images, that vast stretches of its rural areas look as bleak and sterile as the world McCurry gives us in the image of the abandoned service station with its forlorn "INTERSTATE" sign looming in the sky. 

So the images one takes are formed by one's editorial perspective. And McCurry seems to be about the work of illustrating Theroux's claim that the South he found was one inhabited by folks “poorer . . . and less able to manage and more hopeless than many people [he] had traveled among in distressed parts of Africa and Asia.”

So I think that McCurry got the job of visiting the South, finding sites and making images that confirm or illustrate the editorial perspective Theroux uses to organize his book. 


He presents himself here as a pro contract shooter, doing his job as an illustrator. He won't care what I think, because the check didn't bounce. But I don't think his heart was in it. I notice this work does not show up on his website. 

So I can't consider McCurry, on the basis of this work, as an Honorary Southern Photographer. I hope he comes back, with a broader mandate, or on his own dime.  

Then, perhaps, we will see what kind of work he can do in the South. 

If, when I get my copy of the book, I find I have generalized too hastily from a small sample of McCurry's work, I'll come back, revisit, and revise this estimation of his work in the South.

Photography is always -- at least in part -- about finding what one is looking for and constructing images that show that world. Sometimes the world one shows is an artifact of one's process and technique; sometimes, it is a result of the selections one makes from the array of choices the world presents. 

McCurry -- I think -- made his images in the South to illustrate Theroux's argument in the book about the American rural South being worse off than some people in Third-World countries. 

Many well-known photographers -- when they come to work in what is for them a new part of the world -- make the images they usually make, and which they are expected to make by their audiences.

Photographers, like artists everywhere, have a way of developing a distinctive style, whether it reside in subject matter, mode of depiction, or technique of working. Style is not a bad thing in the arts. But it has consequences.  

This is one approach that photographers take -- to produce work in a distinctive style that people come to identify with this person, hence to expect to see it in his or her work, and then are disappointed if new work is not in that style.

Some years ago, the High Museum in Atlanta hired the English photographer Martin Parr to produce a portfolio of work for them in the South. Parr came in, and, as I noted in an earlier blog post, made a set of images that look like the images that Martin Parr makes.  They were really hard to distinguish from the work he does on England, or anywhere else, for that matter.

Last spring, Roger May and some other folks got upset because of the work that resulted when the NYC-based photographer Bruce Gilden was hired to do a photo shoot in West Virginia, later published in the on-line magazine VICE.

 
May's concern was that Gilden's photographs -- admittedly the result of only 2 days' work -- reinforce stereotypes of life in Appalachia held by those unfamiliar with the region, stereotypes that May has set out to address through his admirable Looking at Appalachia project. 

The only problem is, that when you hire Bruce Gilden to make photographs, Gilden will make the photographs he believes in, and that he makes everywhere he goes. None of the portraits below, for example, were made in West Virginia.

If they are any indication, you might say the folks in West Virginia got off easy. But for Gilden, this way of working is true and honest, and the images he produces fulfill his vision. 

From Gilden's perspective, his subjects in these images are interesting to him precisely because he believes them to be "invisible" 

“A lot of these people are invisible," Gilden said in an interview on Slate -- "and people don’t want to look at them and if you don’t look at them how can you help them? When you pay attention to those who are usually ignored, it makes their day. 

"That’s not why I do it. I’m not claiming to be a humanitarian; I’m a photographer. I always photograph what’s interesting to me and it has always been people who are underdogs because I see myself as an underdog.”

Maybe all this is a reminder that you can't make everyone happy all of the time.  Gilden's work is in keeping with his vision and his understanding of the world, and it doesn't make Roger May happy. 

Maybe, because to May, the people Gilden photographed in West Virginia aren't invisible at all. 

McCurry makes work in the South to illustrate Theroux's editorial perspective, and it doesn't make me happy because I see it as superficial, formulaic, and shaped by a predetermined set of claims rather than being open and responsive to the people and things one finds in unfamiliar places.

Sure is tough, sometimes, being a photographer.