Carrie Mae Weems at the Nasher Museum

Honorary Southern Photographer Carrie Mae Weems recently delivered the Rothschild Lecture for 2014 at the Nasher Museum of Art on the campus of Duke University.

Folks who would like to get at least the flavor of her lecture may now do so, thanks to the generous selections from her talk that the Nasher folks have gathered on their blog, HERE.

Southern Photographers in the News, Part 2 -- Early Spring, 2014

 
A couple more items from the news:

1. New Orleans-based photographer William Widmer is featured on the New Yorker magazine's website with a portfolio of his work A Cajun Courir, documenting Mardi Gras festivities in western coastal Louisiana.

This is a very un-New Orleans version of Mardi Gras.

The New Yorker describes Courir de Mardi Gras as "a ceremonial run that is believed to have its roots in Medieval French begging customs. Participants travel the countryside on horseback and on foot, soliciting ingredients for a communal gumbo that is prepared at the end of the run."

Some stunning images by Widmer on view here, well worth your attention.

2. Honorary Southern Photographer Dawoud Bey has several images in this year's Whitney Biennial, including the diptych Maxine Adams and Amelia Maxwell, from Bey's portfolio The Birmingham Project (see above).

Bey's work, including his formal portrait of Barack Obama, is on exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art,  at 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street, in Manhattan, through May 25th, 2014.

Good to see Southern photographers, and Southern subjects, on view in NYC.

S[x]SE for March 2014

The latest issue (Volume IX, Issue 2) of South by South East (S[x]SE) Photography Magazine is now out for spring 2014, and it has all the fine photography and engaging features we have come to expect from S[x]SE.

Editor Nancy McCrary features in this issue a portfolio of work by New Orleans-based photographer Meg Turner (see image above) made in Chernobyl. There is also a long interview with Turner about her work, and especially about this body of work made far from Turner's home base in Louisiana.

The rest of the issue is devoted to a series of portfolios that all deal in one way or another with the subject of farms.

Photographers of farms include  Jimmy Williams, Kim Lane (see image 2 below), Mark Mosrie (see image above), Vincent Lawson, Robert A. Schaefer, Jr., Brandon Thibodeaux, Marla Puziss, Tina Bulka, Brett Schenning, Perry Dilbeck, Marge Marino, Allison Barnes, and Dan Routh (see image below).

In addition to all this fine photography there are book notices and reviews and other features we have come to expect, and value, from S[xS]E.

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

To subscribe, to do the right thing, go here.

Don't put it off any longer. We Southern photographers need to support our basic institutions,

You know you should subscribe. You know it, you really do.

Southern Photographers in the News -- Early Spring, 2014

Three items of interest in the current press:

1. Photo District News has just released its list of 30 New and Emerging Photographers, and they include the following photographers with Southern roots or connections:

Billy Kidd (born in Pensacola, Florida)
Theron Humphrey (born in Jacksonville, NC; attended Savannah College of Art and Design; see image above)
Josh Wool (born in Charleston, SC; attended the College of Charleston; see image below)

Bryan Schutmaat (born in Houston, TX; works in Austin, TX)
Bryan Derballa (born in Orlando, Florida)
Greer Muldowney (attended the Savannah College of Art and Design)

2. The Onward Photography Blog is now featuring an extensive interview with Chattanooga, TN-based photographer Joe Reynolds, here. See one of Reynolds' images below.

3.Rebekah Jacob, owner of Charleston's Rebekah Jacob Gallery, will be hosting an exhibition of Civil-Rights Era photographs for one night only, on March 12th, 2014, at the Abramson Family Auditorium on the Washington, DC campus of NYU, at 1307 L Street, NW,  in Washington, DC.

The show, Created Equal, starts at 6:00 pm on the 12th, and includes photographs of the Civil Rights Era by a number of distinguished photographers, including Ernest Withers, Bruce Davidson, and Bob Adelman

There will also be a screening of the documentary film Freedom Riders, a film by Stanley Nelson, starting at 6:30 on the 12th, followed by a panel discussion featuring Deborah Willis, of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, Arun Chaudhary (TSOA '04), first official videographer of the White House, gallery owner Rebekah Jacob, and Christopher Wilson of the Smithsonian African-American History Museum. 

The panel will be moderated by Gerald L. Early, of Washington University in Saint Louis.

Diana Bloomfield in Walter Magazine

Raleigh-based photographer Diana Bloomfield is the subject of a feature story in the current issue of Raleigh's city magazine Walter.

Bloomfield -- who has won multiple awards and shown her work around the world -- uses chiefly pinhole cameras and alternative printing and processing methods.

Her work ranges in subject matter from landscapes to portraits to elegantly seen fragments of the natural and built worlds.

Bloomfield unites her compositional and printing skills to produce finely-wrought meditative images that invite our repeated contemplation.

There is a stillness in these images, even when the subject matter is in frenetic motion, that contributes to their distinctive tone and mood.

The Walter story, by Samantha Hatem, chronicles the development of Bloomfield's career and captures her distinctive vision.

This is hard-won and well-deserved recognition for the work of one of North Carolina's finest photographers.

NB the portrait of Bloomfield in her lab, at the top of this blog entry, is by Tim Lytvinenko, one of my former students, clearly doing well.