Brief Vacation

I'm taking a brief break from Southern photography to visit another land where the cuisine is based on rice, cornmeal, tomatoes, pork, and chicken.

Y'all take care. See you after the 4th of July. JNW

Photography Shows Open at the High Museum in Atlanta

The High Museum of Art  in Atlanta has three major photography shows up at the moment.

Two of them, representing the work of four photographers, are from the High's ongoing Picturing the South series of commissioned portfolios.

The third show,  Picturing New York, offers over 150 images from the extensive photography collection of  the Museum of Modern Art in NYC, and is the latest in a series of shows up in Atlanta as part of the High's partnership with MoMA.

This show should be an important one, since MoMA has been a major and influential collector of photographs for a long time, but since NYC is Not Around Here, we will say it is surely a worthwhile show, and we commend it to you, and leave the matter at that.

Except to say that the High insists on giving Picturing New York top billing over Picturing the South, which shows bodies of work the High has commissioned about our Native Region, and even paid for.

If you don't believe me, go here. And go figure.

One would think that a show of photographs about the South would be a bigger draw in Atlanta than a show about NYC, but not from the High's point of view. They do say, however, that Pictures from New York tells us about a traditional Southern concern, albeit situated several hundred miles northward.

That is, of course, the question of home, and of those "idiosyncratic details that define New Yorkers' sense of home."

This show, like Picturing the South, opened June 9th and is up through September 22, 2012, coming down just in time not to be on the walls for Atlanta Celebrates Photography, another great programming decision from the folks at the high.

The most important show among those that do feature photographs of the South is the Richard Misrach show that opened on June 2nd and is up through October 7th.

Misrach is one of America's most significant photographers right now, and his images of the devastation wreaked on the landscape of Louisiana by the chemical industry are haunting and compelling.

Louisiana, like many Southern states, has been willing to sell its soul to industry for the sake of jobs, regardless of the environmental cost or the cost in human misery. Misrach's images help us keep track of that cost.

Misrach's show, like the work in the Picturing the South show, was funded by the High as part of its ongoing series of commissions to build its collection of work about the South from major photographers.

Misrach has been working on this portfolio for some time, and its good finally to have it on the walls at the High.

The show called Picturing the South features the work of three photographers, England's Martin Parr, New York's Shane Lavalette, and  New York's Kael Alford, who were commissioned this year by the High for work on the South.

You can see a good bit of this work on the CNN blog, with Parr here, Lavalette here, and Alford here.

There is a video about Martin Parr at work on his project, here.

Based on the CNN images, I'd say that Parr flew in, made Martin Parr-like images on a stroll down Peachtree, and flew back to London for his next shoot, and his next pay check.

Which is OK, I guess. After all, a shooter's gotta get paid. 

Lavalette says he was inspired by Southern music to make his work, though he sought "to explore the relationship between traditional music and the contemporary landscape through a more poetic lens" than presumably a more documentary lens. He chose to "let the music itself carry the pictures."

Alford's work represents a homecoming for her, and a respite from the war photography that has engaged her in recent years.

Her ancestors lived on the Louisiana coastline she now photographs (see image above), and her connections to her subjects, and her emotional response to this place, so familiar and yet so strange, in many and often complex and conflicting ways, come through this body of work with rare intensity and depth.

All this work makes Atlanta a great place to get to in the coming months. I hope to make it, myself. 

Roger May Photographs a Strange Old Man

Cary, NC-based photographer Roger May recently found a strange old man in a bar on Hillsborough Street in Raleigh, NC, and made this photograph.

Roger is better known as a photographer of Appalachia, as a philosopher of photography,  and as the author of the very fine blog Walk Your Camera, in which this photograph first appeared.

We trust that this image will not irremediably damage Roger's career as a photographer.

Southern History and Photography Turn Kitsch in New York City

Christine Calabro is a curator at an online art gallery based in New York City called Artspace, and she is getting married.

Artspace has devoted one of its email messages to her, and especially to her wedding plans.

You can see the original entry here.

The connection is that in the message she provides us with a list of her 10 favorite photographs available through Artspace, ostensibly because she thinks they would make great wedding presents.

So, this is sort of a bridal registry for the artfully inclined.

Her is what she says: "There is no more timeless gift to give or receive than a work of art, a special piece that will richen (sic) in meaning with time and intimate engagement, just like love.

"With my own wedding approaching at the end of this month, I’ve assembled a collection of elegant works on Artspace that I would truly enjoy living around. (Hint, hint.)"

Interestingly, one of Christine's favorites is Walker Evans' iconic image, above, of the Breakfast Room at Belle Grove Plantation, built by John Andrews, a wealthy sugar planter, near White Castle in Iberville Parish, Louisiana.

Belle Grove Plantation had 75 rooms spread over 4 floors, an act of Southern planter hubris. It was finished in 1857, just in time for the Civil War and the collapse of the plantation economy. It sat vacant after 1925 and was finally destroyed by fire in 1957.

Clarence Laughlin, in his Ghosts along the Mississippi,  described Belle Grove as a "tremendous mass [that] rose on huge brick foundation arches over twelve feet above the surrounding earth, its walls and mantels were plastered and carved by the most expert European craftsmen money could secure, its great flight of brick steps was covered with imported marble, its door knobs and keyhole guards were of silver, its pillars bore Corinthian capitals six feet high but of the utmost refinement."

Evans visited Belle Grove in 1935, just in time to catch a sense of the emptiness of Southern antebellum vanity and arrogance that a society built on human bondage could flourish and endure.

Well, Calabro loves "the timeless quality of this photograph." To her, and with no trace of history or irony in her language, "this photograph shows a once-grand private mansion that was left derelict to age at the mercy of the elements." 

She believes this photograph is a "truly classic piece reminiscent of the home in Yonkers where we will get married."

I wonder if that home in Yonkers was build with slave labor, like Belle Grove.

Reports from Look3, UPDATED

Here are some links to reports from Look3, for those of us who cannot be there in person.

From the New York Times,  about photography collectives on view at Look3, including Luceo Images, based in our part of the country.  More on them, from the Times, here.

From Lightbox.

From the local papers and the local TV Station.

From MSNBC.

From PhotoShelter.

From BagNotes.

Follow on Twitter, here.

And FaceBook, here.

Oh, to be under the trees in downtown Charlottesville, and reveling in the riches of photography!