Highlights from: Slow Exposures

Install Image by Ann George

Last weekend I had the pleasure of attending the photography event Slow Exposures in Pike County, Georgia. It was a weekend packed with nontraditional photography events, like pop-up exhibitions, soirees with three legged dogs, and late night cabin critiques. After an exciting (and tiring!) weekend, I highly suggest heading to this event next year, and entering the annual juried exhibition.

Here are a few highlights:

Install Image by Ann George

"The Posse" Pop-up Exhibition 

Time, Place, and Eternity: Flannery O’Connor and the Craft of Photography

Anne Berry, Ann George, Bryce Lankard, S. Gayle Stevens, and Lori Vrba

Exhibition Statement from the artists:

The writer [photographer] operates at a particular crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location” (59):  A photographer need only substitute nouns: photographer for writer and photograph for story, to understand how Flannery O’Connor’s thoughts on the craft of writing apply to the art of photography. This year, which marks the fifty-year anniversary of her death, five southern photographers pay tribute to Flannery O’Connor by creating a pop-up exhibit in the barn at Split Oak Farm in Zebulon, GA as part of Slow Exposures, A Juried Exhibition Celebrating Photography of the Rural South. This exhibit follows the Posse’s 2013 pop up, Hay Now, which New York curator John Bennette called “the most brilliant installation ever to come down 109:” In his words, “My breath was swept away. I said, ‘hallelujah, something wonderful has come to this town.” Time, Place, and Eternity explores five aspects in Flannery O’Connor’s writings that relate to the craft of photography: Grace, Mystery, Manners, Gesture, and Habit. We are opening the exhibit at SlowExposures, and our goal is for it to travel to other venues throughout the coming year.

Eliot Dudik 
On This Land I See Heroes and Saints
Curated by John A. Bennette

Exhibition Statement from Slow Exposures: 

"This unique exhibition combines related bodies of work by Elliot Dudik: Broken Land and Still Lives. Mr. Bennette was inspired by Mr.Dudik’s images and ideas as well as The Good Lord Bird: A Novel by James McBride, winner of the 2013 National Book Award. It is an inspired and imaginative retelling of the events around abolitionist John Brown’s cause from the perspective of 12 year-old Henry Shackleford, a Kansas slave Brown mistakes for a girl. Henry, living in disguise joins the band of abolitionists and bears witness to meetings with Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, as well as the raid on Harpers Ferry.

Mr. Dudik’s work is timely, or maybe timeless, as it deals with a subject that has plagued man for generations: War. At the time of the Civil War, photography was coming into its own. The elements of War: battles, casualties, the land and the pre-battle keepsakes became one of the first subjects of importance recorded with this new technology.As a direct result of the Civil War, America was reborn at the beginning of the 20th century—it was to be The American Century when the nation rose from the ashes of war.

Broken Land is a meditation on key battle sites that will evoke conversations. Dudik’s thought processes are revealed through his artist statement, “These photographs are an attempt to preserve American History, not relish it, but to recognize its cyclical nature and derail that seemingly inevitable tendency for repetition.”

Still Lives is a photo essay of Civil War re-enactors, people from all walks of life coming together, for many reasons, to preserve history to the best of their abilities. This photo essay is an ongoing series of portraits, which have stories to tell and memories to give, that places the viewer at the critical moment on the battlefields."

McNair Evans
Confessions for a Son
Winner of the Conlan Prize for First Place in Slow Exposures 2013

Project Statement from the artist: 

There was no man that my father admired more than his father, and no one his father admired more than the man who raised him. With tenderness of heart and warm humor my father met everyone as his equal.

Upon his death in November 2000, I was exposed to our family business’s insolvency. Dad faced a series of devastating fires, bad crops, perpetual over- extension and high-interest loans. Five generations of familial and financial stability fractured. While the economic effects were immediately obvious, the emotional implications lingered beneath the surface for nine years.

In 2010 I returned home to photograph the lasting psychological landscape of Dad’s legacy. Retracing my father’s life, I used photography to comprehend its events. Visiting the farms where we hunted, his college dorm rooms, and his oldest friends, I photographed his family members and businesses while researching his character and actions. I could not equate these.

Initially confused and angry, I grew to know him as a teenager, college student, co-worker, life-long friend, and father who lovingly withheld business realities. I witnessed shortcomings and successes and found empathy with a man who faced so much in his life. His sacrifices cost the ultimate price, and accepting that some questions may never be answered, I grew to love him again.

Confessions for a Son juxtaposes these photographs with those taken by my father roughly 40 years ago. Photographs from family archives and experimental practices join to explore this complex relationship between father and son. These works share my emotions after his death, my search to learn more abut him in recent years, and the journey of acceptance and forgiveness.

These pictures are my way of saying its OK. Everything that happened is done and it’s OK. They are my way of taking ownership of everything that I felt, and all the anger and all the shame, and saying, “Yes, I felt that, and it’s OK to feel that, and I still love you.”

Aline Smithson and Alex Dilworth discussing second place winner, Aaron Blum at the juror talk

Photography of the Rural South

Juried by Aline Smithson and Alexa Dilworth

Exhibition Statement from Slow Exposures:

"Every photographer has had the experience of seeing an image and passing it by. We did not stop the car, turn around, go back….interrupt that conversation… take the photograph that was there right in front of our eyes. Many such “I wish I had taken the time” moments dot our shared lives as photographers. And whether we live in the rural south, or visit and pass thru the southern countryside, we all see the evidence of a disappearing rural lifestyle, architecture and way of life that has historically existed in small southern towns, homes and lives for decades.

Slow Exposures began and continues to be a unifying platform to challenge photographers to not only stop, turn the car around and take photographs of this south that is fading away – sometimes gently, sometimes harshly – but to also actively seek out and preserve thru photography, the South today.

Photographs tell stories. Photographs document a window into our present – which becomes the future generations past – and as time capsules, are priceless gifts to ourselves.

SlowExposures honors this mission and I am proud to continue to support this photographic tradition." --Gary Gruby

Judy Sherrod & S. Gayle Stevens

One year ago, Judy Sherrod and S. Gayle Stevens embarked on a new adventure, a collaboration entitled Nocturnes, born of the gulf in Pass Christian Mississippi. Stevens a wet plate collodion artist and Sherrod a pinhole camera maker joined together to create something not done before mammoth plate pinhole wet plate tintypes. They have been very successful at it. Their collaboration has yielded publication in South by Southeast magazine, Lenscratch, and will be included in the next edition of Christopher James, The Book of Alternative Photographic Processes. Over the course of a year the duet shot 49, twenty by twenty inch pinhole tintypes of the gulf.

View more of their work here 

Ashley Kauschinger: Can you talk a bit about how your collaboration, and the series Nocturnes, began?

Judy Sherrod: It was a fluke. An experiment. I was too stupid to know that “it couldn’t be done” – large and ultra-large pinhole wet-plate. Gayle was making small works. It was something we agreed to try “just because.” We were elated by the initial results – 11x14 plates. We were also overwhelmed by the nature of the emulsion and how it rendered the image. So we went to 20x20s because that’s the size trays we had at the time, 20x24. My job was to make the camera. Gayle is the wet-plate collodion expert.

S. Gayle Stevens: Well I think it started over a bottle of Prosecco as most things with me and Judy start or end with a bottle of Prosecco. I shoot a lot in Pass Christian, MS. I did a series on pass after Katrina so I am drawn to the area and I have a darkroom there underneath Helen Davis house, a watercolor artist whose family lives in the pass. I am from the Chicago area, and Judy is from Texas, so Mississippi is our halfway point. Judy builds pinhole cameras and shoots film mostly. She is a great camera maker. Judy wanted to come out to shoot some wet plate. She asked what was the largest wet plate pinhole. I wasn’t sure but was pretty positive no one had shot a mammoth plate pinhole so we decided we would. I like square format so I recommended 20x20. For Nocturnes, I am drawn to the water so the first shot we did was of the gulf. We tried the land but my gut instinct was that this should be a series on the gulf. We discussed over Prosecco, and Nocturnes was born. 

AK: How is working with another photographer? Ever too many cooks in the kitchen? Is it liberating?

JS: Gayle has her expertise and I have mine. So we stay out of each other’s “stews.” But when there are problems, and there always are, we work together to figure out solutions. Any and all ideas are potential solutions, so any and all ideas are good. I find the collaboration liberating. Two heads are better than one. Four eyes are better than two. And we need all four hands.

What makes it most liberating is having two creative resources. And there’s a synergy to that, where one plus one equals three or more. We have worked hard to finish this first project – the first fifty plates. Now we have some opportunities to expand the project and try the things we’ve been adding to the to-do list. This is where we get to go a little crazy.

SGS: It’s really good and it's different. She pushes me to go in directions I might not have gone. As far as photography is concerned size is not important to me, so I might not have ventured into mammoth plates, as it does create a lot of problems. I think it strengthens me as an artist. We have play days and days when we each just work on our own, then we usually meet up for cocktails and a nice meal to discuss the plates and what we want to do next. Liberating... I never really thought about that but yeah someone to bounce things off of and someone who can share the workload so it's not all on one back, so yes.

AK: In the series statement, you speak about music as well as landscape surveying. How do you think about creating a poetic landscape?

JS: I look at the beauty that is rendered by the plate and by Gayle’s exposure. It’s not what I see when I Iook at the water. It IS like a musical composition. We have these elements, these variables. And they are assembled to create the image. There is a libretto also, somewhat. We are the libretto. We have words we use to describe the images to ourselves. Now that you have brought that to mind, I may start recording the words. Making the accompanying libretto. It is certainly expressive, and perhaps that makes it poetic.

SGS: I think the sea does that. In the waters is the beauty, the music, the poetry written in the sands, the lyrical voice of the waves, I am mesmerized. I walk, I watch pelicans glide above the waves, the sun glisten on the water, the waves breaking, and the gulls add staccato notes to the song...

Keats said it better: 

Feast them upon the wideness of the Sea; 

        Oh ye! whose ears are dinned with uproar rude, 

    Or fed too much with cloying melody--- 

        Sit ye near some old Cavern's Mouth and brood, 

Until ye start, as if the sea nymphs quired! 

AK: How does promoting the work differ in a collaborative team? What is this process like?

JS: Scattered like cats. It takes both of us. We both look for opportunities. We both have methods of presentation, and we have different ways of describing the project. We had to arm wrestle when writing the statement. That is why we are answering separately here. We each bring our own experiences to the collaboration and that is what makes it special. We’re not cut from the same mold. Different experiences, different traditions, different values, different gifts.

I could not be more fortunate.

SGS: We both just look at what is going on and write/text back and forth what do you think about this one ... here is a juror I’d like to see our work or here is a publication I think we should be in. Whoever is less busy at the time will take care of entries, submissions and sending out work to galleries and such… We don't have set rules. But Judy is the marketing smarts.