New Orleans Photo Alliance/Michael P. Smith Call for Submissions

The New Orleans Photo Alliance is now receiving application for its 2013 Michael P. Smith Documentary Photography Award.

The deadline for submissions is March 29th, 2013.

Kael Alford was the winner of this award in 2012 (see image above). 

Here is how they describe the program and the process for recognition:

"The Michael P. Smith Fund For Documentary Photography (MPS Fund) was created by the New Orleans Photo Alliance to honor the life and work of Michael P. Smith, one of New Orleans’ most legendary and beloved documentary photographers.

"The MPS Fund awards one $5000 grant annually to a Gulf Coast photographer whose work combines artistic excellence and a sustained commitment to a long-term cultural documentary project.

"Both emerging and established photographers residing in the Gulf Coast states of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida are eligible to apply. The subject matter for the proposed project is not limited to the Gulf Coast region."

The guidelines are here. If you are a shooter residing in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, or Florida, here's your chance.

1:1000 Celebrates Two Years of Southern Photography

The good folks at One One Thousand (1:1000), the online magazine of Southern Photography, are justly proud of their well-deserved success in completing their first two years of  providing fine work by Southern photographers.

They are celebrating with a double issue featuring work by 4 photographers chosen after a rigorous screening process.

The four photographers they've selected -- Lisa Elmaleh, Dawn Roe, Deb Schwedhelm, and Susan Worsham
  -- cover a wide range of subject matter and technique in their photography, from tintype photography of traditional musicians to digital color photographs of contemporary Southern suburbia.

All of this work, however, deals with human experience of the past, or the present in relationship to the past, a personal past, a past that both enables and burdens, a past one seeks to preserve, or get rid of, or come to terms with, or make meaning from, in other words, photographs from the heart of the Southern photographic enterprise.

Brooklyn-based photographer Lisa Elmaleh uses a traditional photographic practice -- tintype -- to document some current practitioners of traditional American music. Here, with a nice play on words, she offers images from her American Folk portfolio.

She's found these folks in Southern Appalachia, playing as she says, "on porches, at dances, at festivals, and in church meetings. The melodies are oft times simple, and the lyrics often resonate with the stories of life: love, hard labor, slavery, farming, tragedies, death, and god. The songs are passed down from generation to generation."

Elmaleh utilizes "an on-site darkroom and a large format antiquated camera."

"Because of the nature of [her] process, typically, a whole day is spent with each subject – each 8x10 tintype is hand coated, exposed in a large format camera, and developed on site in a darkroom in the back of my pickup truck."

So, for Elmaleh, "The tradition of American music echoes in the historic nature of the tintype photographic process."
 

Asheville- and Winter Park, Florida-based photographer Dawn Roe has images from her No One Was With Her When She Died  portfolio, images, she says, "were made in reaction and response to my daily surroundings within and throughout the home, studio and landscape."

These are haunting images, images in which the same object is seen more than once, and from different angles, and under different conditions of lighting, focus, or composition.

Roe says that they "serve as recordings of my efforts to make visible perceptual inconsistencies between experienced and recorded time.

"Trees, weeds and leaves along with dew, sparkles, plastic and glass are the materials at play within these fixated non-moments, where only a peripheral glimpse is captured within an endless optical flow.

"These scenes sit empty and alone. I sometimes lament that we cannot “know” things in time, but only through recollection, which can be temporally very near or very far.

 "And so, I look through and to the camera as both device and mechanism for perceiving and being in space and time."

Dawn also has some interesting things to say about Robert Frank, here. 

Tampa-based photographer Deb Schwedhelm offers images from her Whispers from the Sea  portfolio, images that offer strikingly different angles of vision and perspectives on her subjects, all seen from the water.

Schwedhelm started photographing from the water in a pool, but soon moved to the open sea, where she finds that "Photographing in the water is an intimate yet freeing process – one of letting go, looking inward and trusting."

Working from the water, she attends to ways in which the "life we live today is powerfully influenced and shaped by past experiences."

For her, these experiences include "an unconventional childhood (which I have very little recollection of), my 10 years of military service, my career as a registered nurse, my evolution as a photographer and my experiences as a mother."

"These things culminate, visually, in a complex and evocative mix of photographs in my portfolio, which often explores themes such as childhood identity and human experience."

So, "Whispers from the Sea is an exploration of contrasts – from stormy, deep and challenging to tranquil, buoyant and unencumbered. I believe that within these juxtapositions lies the narrative of life.

This series is about feeling, exploration and discovery. It is an effort to conjure up and expose what one might have locked deep down inside"

Richmond-based photographer Susan Worsham   is represented here by images from her Bittersweet On Bostwick Lane portfolio, itself a selection from her larger body of work Some Fox Trails In Virginia.

This body of work grows out of deep personal loss, the death in just a few years of Worsham's father, brother (by suicide), and mother.

This work also grows out of Worsham's relationship with her neighbor Margaret Daniel, a biology teacher and old friend of the family.  Worsham remembers that Daniel "is one of the last remaining threads from my childhood and was the last person to see my brother alive. She made Russell her homemade bread and he finished the whole loaf before he shot himself." 

So these images are about memory and loss and about transitions and relationships of long standing, and about serendipity, the serendipity of Worsham's finding "a set of antique veterinary slides" shortly after her mother died. 

"They were some of the most interesting things that I had ever seen," Worsham says. "They seemed to hold beauty and death at the same time. I framed 90 of them in a long wooden frame resembling the shape of the slide itself. It was the first piece of art that I made after my mother died." 

This work led her to photograph her "old childhood home as well as my oldest neighbor, Margaret."

And so, in good Southern fashion, Worsham says, "the story came full circle one day when Margaret brought out her own dissection kit and microscope slides. I had forgotten that she had been a biology teacher, and here she was holding the same sort of slides that I was so fascinated by. 

"Margaret's microscope and slides have since become a metaphor for my own desire to look deeper into the landscape of my childhood. From the flora and fauna to the feelings, Margaret calls it "blood work."

There is lots of blood in Southern history, blood that was shed, the blood  of family ties, blood that is good blood or bad blood. Worsham's is one, creative, helpful way of dealing with it.

There is much fine work here to joy in, and to get lost in. The folks at One One Thousand have much to feel celebratory about.

Allison Barnes and Eleanor Owen Kerr on 1:1000

The Southern photography ezine One: One Thousand features work in the November 2012 issue by Savannah-based photographer Allison Barnes and by Baton Rouge-based photographer Eleanor Owen Kerr.

Both these photographers work in black and white, and both attend in their work to the land and the water of the South, and to the traces of life, both human and animal, that makes its way across the Southern landscape.

Barnes is concerned with the transitory character of the marks we leave on the land, and the illusion of permanence that the camera gives to the landscape it records.

Her images -- from her portfolio Autobiogeography -- she says, "document marks as a collection of clues, suggesting that place is itself temporally layered, a palimpsest of the multiple traces left by individuals and groups. 

"These markers are sometimes literally embedded within the landscape, such as raccoon tracks in the earth and the evidence of human passage, or commemorate a natural event, including a boars passing and the death of an animal."

The traces of human and animal transitions across the landscape, in her view, "offer a visible history of a past presence yet carry a tension between the ephemeral and permanent." 

The role of the photographer, in her view, is to give some permanence to the traces of the past's impermanence. 

"The landscape I walk remains after my departure and a new trace is formed when the index of that landscape is transferred onto paper. A print is the material and permanent manifestation that provides access to a mark now erased but remaining persistently present." 

Eleanor Owen Kerr's landscapes also document the effects of the human on the natural landscape, especially the ways in which we have intervened between the land and the water, and especially the land of Louisiana and the water of the Mississippi River.

Her portfolio is called On the Batture, the land between the river and its levees, a no-man's land that is called in French "batture" – literally, the land that is "beaten on" by the river. 

Kerr notes that the "batture is ephemeral. It ebbs, flows, and reforms, controlled only by the whims of the river. Sometimes under water, sometimes choked by vines and dense undergrowth, the batture is a raw, transitional space where the landscape fluctuates in accordance with the river's pulse." 

Kerr says the project began when she walked over the levee and found "a different world." 

"I was immediately engulfed," she says, "by the powerful mystery and primal energy in this ribbon of wild land separated from towns, cars, and highways by the mere sixty foot ribbon of levee between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. "Governed only by the push and pull of flood and drought, nature holds sway on the batture while urban life goes on just a few hundred feet away."

 Trace, illusion, permanence, the ephemerial, the enduring -- aspects of the South's haunted landscape, well-seen and well-captured in this work. 
 

SxSE for Fall and Winter

Nancy McCrary and all the good folks at South x Southeast Photo Magazine (SxSE) have brought us two recent issues -- Fall 2012 and Winter 2013 -- that give us much fine work to contemplate in this season when, as the song goes, this is the time for man and beast to stand and watch the seasons turn.

The Fall 2012 issue contains the results of SxSE's first Holiday Contest, as well as work from SlowExposures Tenth Anniversary show, held back in September. This is well-earned notice for the folks at SlowExposures who need and deserve our thanks and appreciation for all they have done to bring the photography world's attention to the rural South

The Winter 2013 issue brings us the work of seven photographers who bring our attention nature in all the ways a camera can record it, from close-ups of nature's fine details to landscapes that give us the grand view of it all.

Here there are also images that remind us in this season of winter of our own part in the cycles of nature, complicated though they may be (see image above, by Peter Essick, Commuting with Nature).

Images here also remind us of our own mortality, of the fact that as Ash Wednesday approaches, we are dust and to dust we shall return.

In addition, in both issues there are all the regular features, including museum and gallery reviews (here Rebecka Jacob's Charleston Gallery and Lumiere in Atlanta),  book reviews, videos, and all the rest of the things we have come to expect of SxSE, bringing us the photography of the Southeast, up close, in depth, and and all worthy of our attention.

Congratulations are also in order, since SxSE has been named among the “Best of 2012” by Le Journal de la Photographie. A richly deserved honor!

And you can have access to all this fine -- and award-winning -- work for a very reasonable fee.

You can subscribe to the online version here.

Don't put it off any longer.

You know you should subscribe.

 You know it, you really do.

Collections, Part Three -- Slow Exposures 10th Anniversary Retrospective

One of the major events on the annual Southern fine art photography calendar is the annual SlowExposures juried show and general photography festival held in and around Concord, in Pike County, Georgia in September. 

The folks who run SlowExposures describe it as "A Juried Exhibition Celebrating Photography of the Rural South," but it is in fact much, much more. In addition to the show itself, there are the satellite shows, the portfolio review, the discussions and seminars with distinguished photographers, the parties, and the black tie Ball.

The whole thing adds up to a major celebration of photography in the American South, well worthy of the notice its gotten nationally in recent years from the New York press, including CNN, Elizabeth Avedon, and the New Yorker magazine.

Here's a History of SlowExposures, especially in the early days.

Last year, 2012, was the 10th annual SlowExposures show. As people do when they realize they have been doing something, and doing it successfully, for a significant period of time, the folks at SlowExposures decided to have a retrospective of the history of their enterprise, a special show drawing together work from all of their previous shows, to be held at the Whiskey Bonding Barn.

So, there you are. Where else can you go to a major photography show in a building called the Whiskey Bonding Barn?  A building that has its own website? And in a field in rural Georgia, at that?

But what was important was what was inside, which consisted of work by a group of photographers who attend to the rural South, and with some success, photographers who had made art and found meaning in the fields and forests and small towns of the part of the South that is still most in transition from the hardscrabble world of nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the glittering postmodern worlds of internationally interconnected cities like Atlanta and Charlotte and Miami and Dallas.

The folks chosen for this show are worthy of being known to us precisely because they have worked successfully in  the part of the South where past and present and future intersect most vividly, where the conflicts and contradictions and tragedies as well as the triumphs and the joys and the celebrations are the most distinctively Southern.

And here they are, with links to their websites when I can find them.  

Roman Alokhin   

Joe Cattoni   

Gary Cerasoli   

Paul Conlan   

Amy E. Davison 

Gilbert Dean   

Eliot Dudik  

McNair Evans

Brenda Fayard   

Jan Fields 

Malgorzata Florkowska  

Raymond Grubb  

Gary Gruby  

Susan Hadorn   

John Lusk Hathaway

Greg Huber   

Vicki Hunt   

Jan Kapoor  

Jane Kerr

Diane Kirkland   

Joanna Knox  

Judy Kuniansky   

Nancy McCrary   

Laura Noel   

Donna Rosser

Anderson Scott  

John Sumner    

Yvette Tolson   

Joe Walter  

Charlotte Weber    

Bruce West  

An impressive community of folks! Here's what Mr. Bennette had to say about the event. 

Congratulations to all these folks, and especially to Nancy and Chris and all the folks who make SlowExposures possible. Everyone interested in photography and in the American South is much in your debt.