SXSE for May Visits Nashville

The online ezine South by Southeast (SXSE) breaks new ground in its May issue (IV-2), with its first issue devoted to photography in one Southern City (in this case, Nashville), and its first Guest Editor, Nashville-based photographer Jerry Atnip.

The result is an issue jam-packed with great photography as well as information about the arts scene in Nashville.

Included are portfolios of work by Nashville photographers Bill Steber, Hollis Bennett, John Baeder (see image above), Norman Lerner, Bob Delevante, Marty Stuart (see image below), Jim McGuire, Robert McCurley, and John Guider.
 

 There are also interviews with people important to the Nashville arts scene, including  Anne Brown of The Arts Company Gallery Paul Polycarpou of Nashville Arts Magazine, and Susan H. Edwards from the Frist Center.

There is a whole bunch of other good stuff, as well, including a portfolio of work by Allison Jarek, a recent BFA graduate of the SCAD. And you can see it all for a very reasonable subscription price.

So, don't put it off any longer. You know you should subscribe. You know it, you really do. 

Gale Stevens and Lisa Elmaleh Practice Wet Plate Collodion on 1:1000

The online photo magazine One: One Thousand brings us two photographers for May who are masters of the wet plate collodion process and who apply it to great effect in documentating the experience of devastation, both natural and man-made.

We tend to think of photography as being about transparency, about bringing us the illusion of a clear view of reality. Alternative processes, especially the wet plate collodion process, often complicate the image we see by adding artifacts of the process itself. on the surface of the image so they come between us and the image itself.

The result can be distracting, even annoying, when not used well, because the process can seem to interfere with the process of seeing.

In the work of Gayle Stevens and Lisa Elmaleh, the subject is devastation, either the havoc created by hurricanes on the fragile coast of Mississippi or the degradation of the Everglades landscape by rapid population growth in Florida.

In both bodies of work on offer here, each image simultaneously shows us what has come to be, but also reminds us of what was, and thus what is lost. This doubleness of vision is mirrored and deepened by effects of the wet plate collodion process.

Illinois-based photographer Gayle Stevens says that she has been drawn repeatedly to photograph the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina to Pass Christian, a community of artists on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.  

She notes that many of her images record the way that nature has begun to reabsorb the signs of human settlement, "like a shroud." 

Traces of the destroyed and abandoned and memories of what was here remain, for Stevens, "the essence of this place," where the loss of community is, for Stevens, "the most devastating aspect of this natural disaster."

Brooklyn-based photographer Lisa Elmaleh says that she works in the wet plate collodion process because it "renders light slowly and reveals the passing of time, a quality which is essential to my work"

She embraces the idea that the Everglades is a unique ecological system, valuable for its place as a source of Florida's abundant variety of plant and animal life, and central to the way water nurtures life and cleanses the air and the land.

Yet this vital habitat is under serious threat. Today, over half of the land originally occupied by the Everglades has been taken for agricultural use or for human habitation. The flow of water through he Everglades must be supported by pumps, channels, and floodgates.

Elmaleh's goal, in this body of work,  she says, is to"preserve an essence of the Everglades, a land we are rapidly losing without knowing the magnitude of our loss."

Elmaleh's images remind me of some of Sally Mann's work on Civil War battlefields and on the ruins of Southern plantation houses; they have the same haunting, melancholy look, a look that richly complements the sense of loss that pervades them.

Anyone who has read Faulkner's Go Down, Moses knows the abiding Southern melancholy is in part a lament for what has been lost, but it is also a grieving over the fact that the cause of that loss is all too often self-inflicted.

Good work here, work worthy of our thoughtful contemplation.

A Right to Sing the Blues -- Southern Musicians and Photographer Jimmy Williams on the NY Times LENS Blog

Today's NY Times LENS blog features the work of Raleigh, NC-based photographer Jimmy Williams, especially his long-term project to photograph Blues musicians as part of the Music Maker Relief Foundation's efforts to preserve blues music by financially supporting older musicians.

Partnering with the Foundation, Williams has photographed a bunch of Blues musicians, most in their 70s and 80s, many of whom had never been photographed professionally.

In exchange for their time, Williams has granted the Foundation and the musicians unlimited use of the photos, while also sharing a percentage of his print sales with the Foundation.

Williams' work is a model of a photographic practice that seeks to reveal the dignity of its subjects.

Williams says, “Blues musicians are the very threads of American music.I try to photograph them in a way that elevates them on a level that I think of them.” 

Congratulations to the musicians, and to Williams -- these folks are getting recognition they all richly deserve.

Matt Eich Mentors Ian Bates in Ohio

The LENS blog of the New York Times is a fine place to learn what's happening in the world of documentary photography and photojournalism.

Lart week, there was a fascinating piece by James Estrin entitled Growing Up Lost in Appalachia, about the work of a young documentary photographer named Ian Bates. 

Bates photographs in Ohio, so his work would not normally fit within the focus of this blog, but in this case I'm making an exception because the story says that Bates is being mentored by one of the South's best young documentary photographers, Norfolk, VA-based photographer Matt Eich.

Good for Matt for taking on this role, and congratulations to Ian for showing us the western side of Appalachia. 

Kael Alford Comes Home to Photograph the American South

Dallas, Texas-based photographer Kael Alford joins Shane Lavalette and Martin Parr in this year's Picturing the South show at the  High Museum of Art, up in Atlanta from June 9th through September 2nd, 2012.

The work Alford will have on display is from her portfolio Home on the Water, a body of work she has made while covering post-Katrina Louisiana.

Alford is best-known for her photojournalism, for her work in dangerous places like Iraq. Born in New York, she had never been to the South before she was assigned by a magazine to cover post-Katrina Louisiana. She's now been working there for five years.

Alford did have some ideas about the world she was entering because her grandmother was from coastal Louisiana, the daughter of French and Native American people, who, Alford says, told her stories as a child about shrimping, and about coastal life, and about family, and loss, and place -- all the basic stuff of Southern stories, and of the Southern experience. 

After her experiences covering war-torn places, she says that photographing in Louisiana after Katrina was a way of coming home.

After her war work, she says, "America felt distant to me, but then I discovered Louisiana, which is like a foreign country to many Americans. New Orleans in that moment was like the places I'd been – the airport was closed, the place was a physical wreck, the people were uprooted and I had a personal connection to Louisiana through my grandmother. I felt comfortable and purposeful again."

Alford's 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.

You can read about Alford's career, and about her work in Iraq and in Louisiana in a long and deeply personal interview she did for the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma with Donna DeCesari, an Associate Professor of Journalism at the University of Texas.

You can hear Alford talk about her homecoming in Louisiana, and about her work there, and see lots more of her images from this portfolio in a video, here, also from the Dart Center.

All I can say to Alford is, welcome home, and thanks for coming on down.

When the Misrach show and Alford's show are both up at the High this summer, that's going to be a powerful combination of photographic visions, and a powerful and compelling reason to head for Atlanta.