UPDATED -- More News of Southern Photographers -- Fall 2015

Catching up with several items of note --

1. I missed the fact, somehow, that McNair Evans (see image above) had a show of work from his Confessions for a Son portfolio at the Sasha Wolf Gallery in NYC, up from late February until early April 2015.

Good to know that images of Laurinburg, NC were on the walls of a gallery in Manhattan. Its often good to get into town for a visit.

2. Honorary Southern Photographer Dawoud Bey has been named a USA Guttman Fellow in the United States Artists program, go here. 

3. Texas-based photographer Keith Carter (see image above) is opening a show of work from his Ghostland portfolio at the Photographs Do Not Bend Gallery in Houston, Texas,  on November 21st, go here. 

4. New Orleans-based photographer L. Kasimu Harris (see image above) has a show of work from his The 10 Year Journey: Reflections of Family, Identity and New Orleans portfolio, up now, through November 14th at the George and Leah McKenna Museum of African-American Art, in New Orleans.  

5. Atlanta-based photographer Debbie Fleming Caffrey (see image above) is having a show of work from her Alphabet portfolio at Jackson Fine Art Gallery in Atlanta, up now through November 28th, 2015. 

Also available at Jackson Fine Art are copies of Caffrey's book Alphabet, go here.

6. Raleigh-based photographer Diana Bloomfield (see image above) has work on the cover and inside the latest issue of Shadow and Light magazine, go here. 


More later, on The Southern Photographer.

Ayana V. Jackson and the Photographer's Gaze

The December 2015 issue of Photo District News (not on their website yet, but will update when they upload it) brings to our attention the photography of Ayana V Jackson, who was born in New Jersey, attended Spelman College in Atlanta, and now resides in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Based on what I've learned about Jackson's photography, its clear to me that she is an Honorary Southern Photographer, because her work brings to our attention significant questions about the practice of Southern photography.

Jackson's work challenges us to consider basic questions about who makes photographs in the South, and for whom, and what the consequences of those choices turn out to be.

Jackson recently had a show of her work at the Mariane Ibrahim Gallery in Seattle, which recognized in her photographs Jackson's desire to explore the response of African and African diaspora societies to the history of their depiction in photography.

Jackson's work, in the words of the Ibrahim Gallery, "combines honed technical skills with richly laced historical allusions to create hauntingly candid portraits that depict varying constructions of African and African-American identities."

Jackson's images are striking, arresting, challenging, absorbing, bringing us back over and over, as strong photographs do. 

More than that, however, they ask us to contemplate the consequences of the fact that most photographs of people of color have been taken by white photographers for mostly white audiences. 

 

Jackson is concerned, as Brienne Walsh puts it, in her PDN essay, "with reconstructing the history of black bodies as captured by white photographers and photojournalists throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries." 

This means that images of people of color made by white photographers -- even those made "to raise awareness," to document racism or oppression, or affirm our common humanity -- operate "within the colonial lexicon of 'otherness.'"

Jackson's images do not function in a simple world of binary opposition. Its not that images of people of color made by people of color are simply "better" than images of people of color made by white photographers.

Jackson is instead interested in the consequences of work by white photographers in constructing images of, and therefore, value judgements about, people of color.
  
To explore this, Jackson re-stages historic photographs of people of color, such as the one at the top of this blog post, which recreates one of the many surviving photographs of a person of color being lynched, somewhere in the American South. 

Another example of Jackson's rephotographing practice is the her recreation of the photograph directly above, of an image made in Africa in the 1890's of a fully clothed Alice Seeley Harris, an English missionary, surrounded by a group of semi-nude Congolese children. 

Jackson's  re-staged image is below; Jackson says, of the original, that "This was one of the first images a European may have ever seem of an African body. Look at how the missionary is clothed, and the 'savages' are unclothed."

Now, she says, "Look at my image, and tell me, who is civilized, and who is savage?" 

Jackson uses herself as her model in many of her images, especially those involving the nudity of her subject matter. 

Perhaps remembering that since 1896, National Geographic has been one of the very few mass market American magazines to feature photographs of nude men and women, but only if they were black or  brown-skinned people, Jackson makes images that foreground the relationship between clothed and nude bodies.

For more on this subject, go here. 

Jackson uses herself for this work rather than models because she believes that if she worked with models she would be recreating rather than critiquing the practice of exploiting the body of another in the name of truth-telling or social commentary.

As Walsh says, "in Jackson's images, there are no 'others' --  there is just the artist, and the discomfort in seeing a black woman pose in a manner that, even today, could be  considered exploitative."

This is powerful, effective, and deeply original work. 

I do not see this work as a call for white folks like me to stop photographing people of color, but for people like me to think more deeply about what we are doing, and how we are doing it, when we do so. 

SE Center for Photography Opens in Greenville, SC

The SE Center for Photography has opened in Greenville, SC, as "an exhibition and education venue promoting the art and enjoyment of fine photography."

The SEC4P plans to offer monthly juried exhibitions as well as solo or group shows in its gallery space in an old industrial building in West Greenville.

The current show up at the SEC4P is a juried show of B + W images, including Greenville, SC-based photographer Kathryn Oliver's image Vera and the Pigs, above.

Their next show opens this Friday, November 6th, 2015, and features work deemed by the juror to represent Narrative Portraits. 

This show also includes work by Oliver (see image August Days, above), as well as work from a lot of other good photographers who, as best I can understand, are Not From Around Here. 

The SEC4P is located at 1239 Pendleton Street in the Village of West Greenville, a former textile mill village now being transformed into an arts district for this thriving city in South Carolina's northwestern corner. 

The SEC4P has also issued calls for work for future shows (go here), and lined up a number of photographers for future solo shows (see current list here -- scroll down to see the list).

Solo shows now on the calendar for 2016 include work by Louisiana-based photographer Ann George and Chapel Hill, NC-based photographer Lori Vrba.
 
Good to see another fine venue for photography opening up in the American South. Long may the folks at the SEC4P thrive! 

Alysia Burton Steele's Delta Jewels

Oxford, MS-based photographer Alysia Burton Steele has published Delta Jewels: In Search of My Grandmother's Wisdom, Steele's project to document -- and learn wisdom from -- the folks Steele calls the Jewels in the Delta.

We've discussed Steele's work previously on this blog (go here), where we learned that Steele's Jewels in the Delta are the church mothers of black Baptist congregations in the Mississippi Delta, over 50 of them, who have shared their stories with Steele while she made their portraits.

Church mothers are leaders in their church communities, recognized for their skills in organizing programs, providing comfort and support to those in need, helping preserve traditions, and inspiring young women in their communities.  
 

Steele's grandmother was a Delta church mother, so the story of the Delta Jewels is also Steele's story, and a story about a remarkable group of people through whom we can come to understand the role of women in Southern religious culture. 

 

In Delta Jewels, Steele finds a way to do a number of things simultaneously -- to bring us beautifully seen images of women of courage, fortitude, and a sense of their place in history -- but also to understand through these folks at least something of Steele's grandmother's generation and the role of women in Southern religious culture.

The publisher's blurb for Delta Jewels gets the book just about right.

The book documents "ordinary women [who] lived extraordinary lives under the harshest conditions of the Jim Crow era and during the courageous changes of the Civil Rights Movement. 

"Steele [has] recorded . . . living witnesses to history and folk ways, and shares the significance of being a Black woman--child, daughter, sister, wife, mother, and grandmother in Mississippi--a Jewel of the Delta."

As I've said frequently, Southern photography is about making meaning of the experience of the American South, in all its tragic complexity. 

The experience of the South can often lead us to bitterness or anger, even  to despair.  

Steele, in these images and in the stories of the women she photographs, finds reason for hope. The faces of the women we see in Steele's images are the faces of people who have found ways of living lives of dignity and purpose and meaning, even under the most difficult of circumstances.

If you want to explore further the kinds of histories and and legacies these women embody, check out a performance of Crowns, by Regina Taylor, when it comes to a theater near you. 

 

When Delta Jewels was published, there was a gathering of church mothers at the Mount Olive Missionary Baptist Church in Mound Bayou, MS,  which was attended by over 300 people, and you can read about that gathering here.

Congratulations to Steele for her fine work, and for this outstanding contribution to the legacy of Southern photography.  

 

Hazel Larsen Archer and Photography at Black Mountain College

The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston has recently opened a show entitled LEAP BEFORE YOU LOOK: Black Mountain College 1933 - 1957. 

Black Mountain College gets the attention of the ICA's curators in Boston because it had a profound impact on the arts in America in the latter half of the 20th century. 

You can purchase the catalog for this show here.

The show at the ICA is a reminder that the story of Black Mountain College is an important story about the South, and about the arts. and about photography. 

Black Mountain College, in the small town of Black Mountain, NC, just east of Asheville, was open from 1933 to 1957, but in that brief time it numbered among its students or faculty members a truly breath-taking number of people who were to transform the visual and performing arts in America in the latter half of the 20th century.

You can learn more about the history of the College here. 

This list includes such distinguished writers, painters, sculptors, dancers, and musicians as Josef and Anni Albers, Josef Breitenbach, John Cage, , Mary Callery, Fritz Cohen, Robert Creeley, Merce Cunningham, Edward Dahlberg, Max Dehn, Willem de Kooning, Robert Duncan, Buckminster Fuller, Walter Gropius, Lou Harrison, Alfred Kazin, Franz Kline, Jacob Lawrence, Richard Lippold, Alvin Lustig, Charles Olson, Albert William Levi, Alexander Schawinsky, Ben Shahn, Arthur Siegel, Theodoros Stamos, Cy Twombly, Jack Tworkov, Robert Motherwell, Robert Rauschenberg and Emerson Woelffer. 

Photographers associated with Black Mountain College included Harry Callahan, Beaumont Newhall, and Aaron Siskind.

Not as well known as a photographer but far more important for Black Mountain College was Hazel Larsen Archer (see image above), who became a student at the College in 1944, then stayed on as a professor of photography until the College closed for good in 1957.

She taught photography to Robert Rauschenberg (the man in the image above) and Cy Twombly, both of whom continued the practice of photography throughout their long careers as painters and artists.  

Robert Rauschenberg's son Christopher would of course grow up to be a fine art photographer and co-founder of PhotoLucida. 

 
Archer documented in her own photography the life of the College and the people who made Black Mountain College the unique educational institution it turned out to be. 

She made portraits of teachers and students, including Merce Cunningham dancing (see image above), whom she photographed in sequences of images, capturing the development of his distinctive style of modern dance at its beginning, communicating movement through space and time. 


 
She also photographed John Cage, Willem de Kooning (see image below), Ruth Asawa, Josef and Anni Albers, and, and, among others, Buckminster Fuller (see image above) surrounded by his amazing array of geometric models.  
 

 
Below is her formal portrait of Robert Rauschenberg. 

Archer also photographed the community in action, especially its engagement in farming, and its efforts to merge faculty and students into a single community, united by their engagement in the arts.

The story of Black Mountain College -- located in a small town in the Blue Ridge Mountains, long before either it or its neighbor Asheville had become the arts centers they are today -- is a reminder that in the South and in the arts sometimes wonderful and magical things happen.  
 
So much started here, so much worth celebrating in the arts, enabled by the time, the location, the people, and in the South, too.
 
Good to remember, and to be thankful that Hazel Larsen Archer was there, as a photographer, to document the people and the place, and what they did there that so strongly influenced American culture for the next half-century.

among its students and faculty including, Robert Rauschenberg, Franz Kline, Walter Gropius, Josef Albers, John Cage, Charles Olson, Buckminster Fuller, Merce Cunningham and Willem de Kooning, - See more at: http://www.theartstory.org/school-black-mountain-college.htm#sthash.XrfkmfDP.dpuf