skip to main |
skip to sidebar
This is definitely the Year of William Eggleston.
After his recent show in London at the National Portrait Gallery, and a feature story in the New York Times, now he is featured in a story in W Magazine, with some nice photographs by NYC-based photographer Eric Chakeen (see image above).
Go here for An Afternoon with William Eggleston, Living Icon, by Alexandra Pechman.
Eggleston is also featured in a story -- "William Eggleston's Groundbreaking, Vivid Color Photographs" --on the American Photo website, go here.
The American Photo story celebrates a show that Eggleston is having at his new gallery in NYC -- the David Zwirner Gallery -- up now through December 17th, 2016, go here.
In addition, Eggleston was the guest of honor at Aperture Foundation's annual benefit gala and photo party, which took place on October 24th at the Edison Ballroom in Manhattan.
The gala was entitled Dear Bill:An evening of art and entertainment in honor of William Eggleston, go here.
Honorary Southern Photographer Eugene Richards has a show of work from his Below the Line: Living Poor in America portfolio up now at the new Bronx Documentary Center through November 6th, 2016.
Images from this body of work were published by Richards in a book of the same name from Consumers Union in 1987, available here.
Richards' work is among the most compelling documentary photography being made these days, and much of his work is made in the American South.
This includes all the images in this blog post, which are part of the show at the Bronx Documentary Center.
We most recently recently caught up with Richards' work on the occasion of the publication of his most recent book, Red Ball of a Sun Slipping Down, (go to our blog post on this book, here).
That book shows Richards transitioning to color photography. Good to be reminded with this show of his remarkable vision as a B+W photographer with this work chiefly from the 1980's.
For more on Richards, and on the images in the show now up at the Bronx Documentary Center, check out this interview with Richards in the online e-zine Interview Magazine, here.
Photographers featured since mid-August in Jeff Rich's ongoing feature Eyes on the South, for the Oxford American, include the following:
Mississippi-based photographer Ashley Coleman (see image above), with images from her Cloud of Witnesses portfolio.
Durham, NC-based photographer Kurney Ramsey (see image above), with images from his Returning portfolio.
Florida-based photographer Benjamin Dimmitt (see image above), with images from his Chassahowitzka Saltwater Intrusion portfolio.
Alabama-based photographer Jack Deese (see image above), with images from his How to Orient Yourself in the Wilderness portfolio.
Louisville, KY-based photographer Michael Morris (see image above), with images from his portfolio What Survives.
Charleston-born but New York-based photographer J Henry Fair (see image above), with images from his portfolio Before The Storm: A Photographic Study of America’s Coastline.
Cleveland, MS-based photographer Kim Rushing (see image above), with images from his Parchman portfolio.
More to come, from The Southern Photographer!
Since memory is an important part of Southern culture and cultural identity, the recent essay by Teju Cole in the New York Times, entitled "Memories of Things Unseen," might be of interest to some of us.
Cole makes the argument that "Photography is inescapably a memorial art. It selects, out of the flow of time, a moment to be preserved, with the moments before and after falling away like sheer cliffs."
"At a dinner party earlier this year,"Cole goes on, "I was in conversation with someone who asked me to define photography. I suggested that it is about retention: not only the ability to make an image directly out of the interaction between light and the tangible world, but also the possibility of saving that image."
Cole uses examples to argue his case for photography as chiefly about memory that are drawn from the world of painting.
He offers us photographs of paintings that have since been destroyed, so that, as he puts it, "when the photograph outlives the body — when people die, scenes change, trees grow or are chopped down — it becomes a memorial."
Cole goes on: "[W]hen the thing photographed is a work of art or architecture that has been destroyed, this effect is amplified even further.
"A painting, sculpture or temple, as a record of both human skill and emotion, is already a site of memory; when its only remaining trace is a photograph, that photograph becomes a memorial to a memory.
"Such a photograph is shadowed by its vanished ancestor."
The relationship between the photograph and its subject is worth pondering, especially when the subject is no longer available to our sight.
But the problem with broad generalizations, especially when they are strongly argued, is of course that one wants to think of counter-examples.
And so I immediately thought of the work of Canadian photographer Jeff Wall (see image above), whose practice is to make photographs that look documentary, but in fact are photographs of staged events.
So if the event never happened that appears to have happened, in the photograph, how can it serve as a memorial of anything?
Your thoughts?
Nancy McCrary, the long-time editor of the estimable SxSE Photomagazine, draws on her experience in a recent post to the online version of Don't Take Pictures.
The subject of this feature is rule-breaking, and in her essay McCrary wants to celebrate photographers who break the rule about clichés in Southern photography.
McCrary says she has "seen more photos of kudzu and magnolias, angry dogs on chains,
plantation homes, rusted-out trucks, cotton still in fields, broken-down
houses, poor white trash, and elderly black people on rickety front
porches than one person should have to view in a lifetime."
McCrary points out how easy it is to "find clichés in the South," but what's not easy is "finding
that photograph that is like a blink."
"You know it," McCrary writes. "You’ve driven past
it. You saw it and you thought, 'wow, that would make a great
photograph.' But, you didn’t make it."
McCrary offers us the work of Statesboro, GA-based photographer Jessica Hines (see all the photographs in this post) as an antidote to the Southern cliché photograph.
For McCrary, "Hines' photographs of the South are . . . . those little glimpses, little
blinks into the South. The ones you wish you’d made."
"Looking at them," McCrary writes, " I
imagine myself riding in a convertible along a two-lane road on a hot
summer afternoon clicking off photographs. If I was as good.
Hines' "photographs . . . invoke spirits and ghosts, and make tangible our
childhood run-wild imaginations growing up in this oppressive heat.
"They
catch the irony, the mysticism, and the trade-off of crazy v. gorgeous.
"I look at her photographs – wild dogs and trailers, early morning
sunrises that catches the dew on the the Fall fields, long-cast shadows
of mid-summer southern suns, the ridiculous “architecture” of our
tourist “attractions”, the way we dovetail guns and religion, and I
think, “yeah, this is good.”
"This is what I wish I were shooting."
What I take away from McCrary's essay, and her choice of images from Hines' large body of work, is that the difference between a cliché and a great image in photographs of the American South is not so much the subject as the perspective on the subject, and the way the subject is seen, in the photographs.
In other words, McCrary's discussion takes us back to that great bit of wisdom in photography, that its all about choices -- choices about where you stand, what you include in the frame, the quality and angle of the light, and the moment you choose to push the button.
Thanks to Hines for what her images teach us to see in the world around us, and for McCrary for recognizing the fine work Hines is doing in her artistic practice.
Posts
