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Some news of Southern photographers, and photographs, in the midst of a chilly Southern winter:
1. Atlanta-based photographers Laura Noel (see image above) and Davion Alston have been awarded IDEA Capital grants to pursue specific projects.
Noel's grant will enable her to fund a book project The Lookout, combining poems Noel has created by stitching together intertwined conversations overheard in public places with photograms made from objects Noel finds in the streets of Atlanta.
Alston's grant will support his project, Sapelo Island (see image above), to document through text and photography the Geechee /Gullah culture of coastal Georgia as it goes through a transition brought about by the influx of tourist-driven commercial developments that threaten the culture and the identity of the island's long-time residents.
2. Mississippi-based photographer Maude Schuyler Clay (see image above) is opening a major show of work from her Mississippi History portfolio at Atlanta's Jackson Fine Art Gallery on February 5th, 2016.
Clay's work is up at Jackson Fine Art through April 16th of this year.
3. Williamsburg, VA-based photographer Eliot Dudik (see image above) has had his Broken Land portfolio featured in the online ezine Hawk and Handsaw, from Unity College in Maine, go here.
More later, from The Southern Photographer.
Items of Interest on a cold January day:
1. Greensboro-based photographer Leah Sobsey (see image above) is publishing a book project with Daylight Books entitled Collections: Birds Bones Butterflies, featuring her photographs of specimens of birds, bones, and butterflies (naturally) from the collections of natural histopry museums.
Sobsey is running a campaign on INDEGOGO to raise money to defray some of the publication costs. Go here if you would like to help her out in this very worthy project.
2. Chapel Hill based photographer Susan Harbage Page (see image above) -- who has a day job as Assistant Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill -- has been interviewed about her photography along the border between Mexico and the USA by folks at the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at UNC.
You can hear a podcast of this interview if you go here.
3. Atlanta's Jennifer Schwartz is involved with Flash Powder Projects, and you can learn more about what she's now up to if you go to the Flash Powder website, here.
4. Seems to me that for a guy from Virginia and points South, Eliot Dudik (see image above) has been spending entirely too much time lately in Maine, and in January too.
Dudik has spent at least part of his time in Bar Harbor, where right now, as of this writing, the temperature is 20 degrees and the wind is blowing over 10 miles per hour.
Young man, what has come over you? Makes me shiver to think about it.
For more news of Dudik's adventures in the frigid North, go here.
5. Raleigh's Roger May (see image above) continues to go great guns with his efforts to diversify the press coverage of Appalachia, including notice in the Atlantic Monthly, here.
6. The latest Southern photographers to be featured on Jeff Rich's Eyes on the South blog for the Oxford American are Jared Ragland (see image above) and Matt Odum (see image below).
7. Nashville-based photographer Shawne Brown (see image below) is the latest Southern photographer to be featured in the online magazine Ain't Bad, here.
8. Stacy Kranitz (see image below) has had images from her portfolio of photographs of young white men doing stupid things, entitled From the Study on Post-Pubescent Manhood, published in the online magazine GUP, go here.
All for now -- I'll be adding to this blog entry in the days ahead. Keep checking back!
Nancy McCrary and all the fine folks at South X Southeast Photomagazine have released their third issue under the new, all-online format.
With the January/February issue for 2016, South by Southeast Photomagazine continues bigger and better than before, and still all on the web, and on the new website, and entirely free.
And a whole bunch of other photographers, too numerous to mention, as well as all the interviews, book reviews, and other features we have come to expect of McCrary and her colleagues at SxSE.
Not to mention the Photo Workshops, and the new SHOP, too.
SxSE is turning into a Center of Southern Photography Culture, and is not to be missed.
Check it out today.
What a gift to us all, this SxSE publication!
Several items of interest here in the waning hours of 2015 --
1. Nashville-based photographer Jerry Park has announced the publication of his first book, Slow Roads Tennessee, available here.
Park's book is drawn from work he made over a 2-year period while roaming the backroads of Tennessee with a Holga camera.
Publication of Slow Roads Tennessee was celebrated by a show of this work this month at Nashville's Arts Company, go here.
Park is a member of SouthLight Salon,
a group of 7 photographers in Nashville, including Jerry Atnip, who
concentrate on Southern photography and are deeply committed to enhancing the quality
of art in our region.
2. Atlanta-based photographer Forest McMullin has recently been getting lots of recognition for work from his Black Cowboys (and Girls) portfolio, documenting the world of African-American rodeos.
See coverage here, in LensCulture, also here, in feature shoot, also here, from Manfrotto.
McMullin reminds us that
African-Americans constituted a significant proportion of the folks who
settled the American West, although their role has been largely ignored
by historians and the media.
This tradition is kept alive today by a network of rodeos -- notably the Bill Pickett Rodeos -- who feature especially participants who are black.
3. Dallas-based photographer Rachael Banks (see image above) was interviewed about her work recently by the Strange Fire Collective, go here.
4. Southern photographers Deborah Luster (see image above) and Sally Mann (see image below) have work in a show that opened in October 2015 at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, TN.
This show is entitled Phantom Bodies: The Human Aura in Art, and includes, along with Luster and Mann, a bunch of heavy hitters in the current art world like Damien Hirst, Gerhard Richter, and Magdalena Abakanowicz.
There is still time to see this show, since it is up at the Frist Center until mid-February 2016.
5. Among the books chosen by Elizabeth Avedon as the best photography books of 2015 are GORDON PARKS: BACK TO FORT SCOTT,
edited by Karen Hass (see image above) and ALPHABET, by Debbie Fleming Caffery (see image below)
6. Lenscratch, on its list of the best of 2015, included photographs by Alabama-based photographer Jared Ragland (see image below), from their State of Alabama project.
8. Lenscratch also liked Winston-Salem-based photographer Heather Evans Smith's Seen but not Heard portfolio as a favorite (see image below).
7. Aline Smthson, editor of Lenscratch, listed Lori Vrba's The Moth Wing Diaries and McNair Evans' Confession for a Son, as among her favorite photography books of 2015.
8. And finally, for now, and for 2015, Jeff Rich in December 2015 featured Atlanta-based photographer Blake Burton's portfolio Ponce City Market (see image above) in his Eyes on the South series, for the Oxford American.
And that's my take on fine art photography in the American South for 2015.
We'll be back next year, folks.
Aline Smithson, the Founder and Editor-in Chief of Lenscratch, has declared that Williamsburg-based photographer Eliot Dudik (see portrait above, by Penn Chan) is "the Grand Master of All Things Photographic" for 2015.
Smithson says, "I stand in amazement at what Eliot has and can achieve. He is a
talented and dedicated large format photographer (we are talking an 8 x
10 camera with double backs–meaning an 8 x 20 camera–see below)."
Smithson then recites Dudik's achievements from 2015, noting that Dudik "recently started the new William and Mary photo department from
scratch, celebrating its establishment with an exhibition of over 100
photographs garnered from various contemporary photographers, which
Eliot single-handedly printed, mounted, and then burned."
She goes on, "Eliot had nine exhibitions in 2015, 4 of them solo shows, with many
more lined up for 2016.
"He made all the frames for the exhibitions, he
created the most talked about leave-behind at last year’s PhotoNOLA and
also won the 2014 PhotoNOLA Review Prize for which he produced a
monograph with custom made linen and foiled covers.
"He won the 2015
Archive of Documentary Arts Collection Award from Duke University and
the 2015 Flash Forward Award–and has just been nominated for the 2016
Baum Award for Emerging American Photographers.
"And if that isn’t
enough, he and Jared Ragland photographed, produced, and printed a spectacular book in ONE DAY during PhotoNOLA.
Smithson concludes, "It doesn’t hurt that he’s a wonderful friend and supporter of all who
he encounters. Needless to say, he’s a constant inspiration."
That's high praise from Aline Smithson, and its well-deserved praise, too.
I had the good fortune to meet Dudik during CLICK! The Triangle Photography Festival in Durham, earlier this year.
Glad to know Dudik, glad to see he is getting the recognition he deserves.
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