This will be their final day for the ‘tintype‘ show, so please come out and have a look-see at this early process in the hands of four contemporary photographers.

Saturday, January 7th, 2012
12noon-5pm

HomeSpace
1128 St Roch Ave.
504.418.8237

Brian, Bruce Schultz, December 2011

See Mark Tucker’s images from the December demo here and read Eric Bookhardt’s review of the exhibition here.

1st Place: Kathleen Robbins

Kathleen Robbins - Burning Field

2nd Place: Sarah Cusimano Miles

Sarah Cusimano Miles - Pangolin

3rd Place: Priya Kambli

Priya Kambli - Dada Aaji and Mama

Wallace Merritt: Reception, from the Melvin series

The PhotoGALA print auction preview is now online here. The gala will take place on Thursday, December 8, 2011 at the Musée Conti Historical Wax Museum in the French Quarter. Advance tickets are only $20, and are available for purchase through our website. Party is from 7-10pm, live auction begins at 8:00.

Proceeds to benefit the New Orleans Photo Alliance, a 501(c)3 nonprofit in support of the photographic arts.

Michael Donnor, Slideluck Potshow © 2010 Marc Pagani Photography - marcpagani.com

PhotoNOLA is a volunteer run festival, and we need many hands to help the events run smoothly. If you’d like to participate as a festival volunteer please fill out our brief form and volunteer coordinator Veronica Hartowicz will be in touch.

Questions? Email volunteer@photonola.org

Thank you!

@PHONOGRAPHY is an open call show exploring impromptu visions captured via phone cameras. Approximately 300 images will be accepted on a first come first served basis to show from December 2nd to December 31st, 2011. Deadline for entries is October 29th, 2011 at midnight.

Janet Wilson: 8-24-11, from the Picture a Day project

Statement:
The readiness of a camera in most everyone’s hands has made capturing moments seem second nature to us these days. The advent of social networking has allowed us to share these moments with our friends and others in a momentary flash, instantly uploading memories and records of our daily lives. Some of these photos are quite remarkable. Yet their instantaneous nature is forever caught and lost in the web of Internet albums and share sites. By printing and framing these temporary images, we encapsulate, for a moment, daily images that reflect our common and uncommon experiences. We are also interested in the now. Twitter is a networking site that has greatly impacted our world through instantaneous information dissemination. By randomly combining tweets (definition: a 140 character fragment of a global conversation) with photography shot via phones, we aim to discover the state of art and dialogue in the 21st century. Will the exhibit reveal these conversations and images to be a cohesive communal thread? Or will the exhibit serve to underline the state of self-referential static that we constantly experience in this age of broadband?

Submission Details:
A 300 dpi image is to be submitted via email along with application form. Applicants will also be required to submit the text of 3 randomly selected tweets along with their image file. The tweets do not have to have any relevance to the subject matter of the submitted image, as they will be picked at random to accompany images. Entry fee of $25 per image covers printing, matting, framing and hanging costs of image. Each piece will be for sale to the public for $50 with 50% of the proceeds benefiting 3 Ring Circus Arts Education Center.

More info & application guidelines: www.3rcp.com
Entry Deadline: October 29th, 2011 at midnight

Clarence John Laughlin: The Eye That Never Sleeps

The Clarence John Laughlin Award was created by the New Orleans Photo Alliance to support the work of photographers who use the medium as a means of creative expression. It honors the life and work of Clarence John Laughlin (1905-1985), a New Orleans photographer best known for his surrealist images of the American South. The Clarence John Laughlin Award grants one $5000 prize annually to a photographer whose work exhibits sustained artistic excellence and creative vision.

George Slade, Curator for Photographic Resource Center, will serve as this year’s juror.

The award is open to emerging and established photographers who reside in the U.S. The online application process requires a portfolio of 10-20 photographs, a written statement, a bio or CV, and a $25 application fee. The application deadline is September 1, 2011. Only one recipient will be selected to receive the $5,000 award.

Click here for guidelines and more information.

About NOPA:
The New Orleans Photo Alliance was formed by a diverse group of photographers in 2006 to foster community and opportunities for photographers in the Gulf South. It is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization whose mission is to encourage the understanding and appreciation of photography. NOPA currently serves more than 350 members from Louisiana and throughout the United States. Since its inception NOPA has sponsored numerous photographic exhibitions, workshops and educational programs, including PhotoNOLA, the annual photography festival held each December in New Orleans. In 2009, NOPA instituted the Michael P. Smith Fund for Documentary Photography, a $5000 annual grant.

Andy Adams – Flak Photo
Martine Chaisson – Martine Chaisson Gallery
Brian Clamp – ClampArt
Stephen Daiter – Stephen Daiter Gallery
Bevin Bering Dubrowski – Houston Center for Photography
Roy Flukinger – Harry Ransom Center
Charles Guice – Charles Guice Contemporary
Neil Harris – Time Magazine
Lisa Hostetler – Milwaukee Art Museum
David Houston – Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art
Holly Hughes – Photo District News (PDN)
Maggie Kennedy – Garden and Gun Magazine
Stella Kramer – Stella Kramer Consulting
Alexandra Le Faou – Foto+Synthesis
Richard McCabe – Ogden Museum of Southern Art
Martin McNamara – Gallery 339
Claire O’Neill – NPR’s The Picture Show
Bill Schwab – North Light Press
Gordon Stettinius – Candela Books
Mary Virginia Swanson – MV Swanson and Associates

The Portfolio Review will take place December 10 & 11 at the International House Hotel. Registration will open online on September 1, 2011, and be filled on a first come first served basis. The registration fee will be $450, guaranteeing each participant 8 reviews.

In order for us to best promote your photo related exhibition before and during PhotoNOLA, please fill out our exhibitions listings questionnaire as thoroughly as possible and send us a few low res jpegs of images that will be in the show. Keep in mind the survey must be submitted all at once, so we suggest having the required information ready before starting to fill it out.

Walker Evans Show at The Ogden, PhotoNOLA 2010. by Bobby Sue Alokhin

Inclusion in the festival guide (online and in print) is free, though we would be grateful for donations to help cover the costs of promotion.

If you have any questions feel free to contact Exhibitions Coordinators:
Andrea Caldwell (andrea@photonola.org, 504-975-4002) or
Veronica Hartowicz (veronica@photonola.org)

***

RM: How did your relationship with Shelby Foote influence the decision to take photographs primarily in Mississippi and Tennessee?

NELL: The first building I photographed for GONE was a brick ruin farmhouse near my home outside Memphis in Fayette County, Tennessee. Afterwards, I went to Shelby Foote to ask him where to find similar antebellum structures. He told me to start looking in Washington, County Mississippi, in the heart of the Delta and the place where he grew up. He said that many of the houses around Vicksburg survived Sherman’s burning rampage as he floated down the Mississippi River and marched across the south to the Atlantic. “In fact,” he said, “I’ve written a story about it.”

Nell Dickerson

The story, “Pillar of Fire,” is a chapter from his 1954 Novel. “Jordan County.” It is set in a fictional version of Washington County. It is about a company of Union soldiers dispatched to burn an aging southerner’s home. His life (and the history of Mississippi Delta) flashes before him as he witnesses his entire legacy going up in flames.

GONE is a photographic essay of the buildings that survived Sherman’s burning, only to fall to ruin through social and economic neglect. The images are paired with the entire text of “Pillar of Fire.” Although they are not a literal translation of the story, the story informed the images I photographed.

The locations are informed by the Mississippi River and cotton country, for it is King Cotton that defines who we are and why we fought the Civil War in the first place.

RM: Did it strike you as best to stick with what you know best as far as choosing locations and structures? Were you already intimately familiar with these places?

NELL: Every place I went was a new discovery. GONE was an anthropology project. (My first degree was in anthropology/ethnographic photography.) Shelby sent me to the town historian in Greenville, Mississippi, and she sent me to the next person who sent me to the next person, and so on, until everybody was intertwined in a huge spider web of kinfolk, hearsay and stories. (This is before social media on the Internet was invented.) It took considerable research, footwork, driving the back roads, listening to oral histories and “visiting.”

House, circa 1843, Fayette County, Tennessee. Nell Dickerson

RM: Did the structure or building/home take precedence (or architectural details, etc.), or the photographs of them? (A chicken-egg question.) Or, more specifically, how did you strike a balance between showing what you would like to see preserved, and what you found more of interest from a more purely photographic standpoint?

NELL: GONE is not an academic endeavor. It is strictly from the heart. So many “documentary” photographers are just voyeurs. I do not consider this a documentary project. I am a fine art photographer. When I entered a building, I sat with in, and let the building speak to me. And or I walked around the outside and had a “conversation” with my camera on the exterior. The images that I selected for the book were the best “photographs” as well as those that related to Shelby’s text. “Pillar of Fire.”

RM: How long was this book in the making?

NELL: Seven years.

RM: How did you go from being asked to do a children’s book to doing this? Did it take much convincing to change anyone’s mind about what you should do?

NELL: It took about thirty seconds once I mentioned that I had the rights to Shelby Foote’s story, “Pillar of Fire.”

Nell Dickerson

RM: Do you expect this book to appeal more to people interested in architectural photography, or Civil War buffs, or historical preservationists, or some mix of all three?

NELL: I hope that the book appeals to people who appreciate a fine book as an object, beautiful photography, a fabulous story by Shelby Foote, Civil War history and architectural preservation.

RM: Is there much hope for the restoration of any of these properties (outside of ones that are more ruins than structures, strictly speaking, a la the Windsor Ruins near Port Gibson MS)? Are there owners who are interested in preserving them?

NELL: A few are restored since I photographed them. Sadly, most have been left to return to the earth.

RM: Would you say that your book is unique, as far as architectural or preservation-oriented photography books go, in focusing attention not only on grand old mansions but small homes, churches and even 19th Century equivalents of modern-day pre-fab houses?

NELL: There are many books and movies that portray the stereotypical “Southern Mansion.” What people don’t realize is that the people who built these temples to King Cotton tended to live in town, up on the hill, away from the mosquitoes and Yellow Fever. (Places like Memphis, New Orleans, Natchez and along the River Road in Louisiana.) The people who actually worked the land lived on the land. These buildings were lived in and used by the people who worked on the farms and grew the cotton for the absentee landowner in “the big house.” Most of the buildings are in the middle of present-day working farms or hidden deep the woods in the backcountry.

RM: Has there been much concern for the latter, previously? Or would see that as similar to gaining attention for, say, the once-overlooked New Orleans shotgun styles?

NELL: I hope that people are interested in preserving their own legacies; whether it is the family home, your grandmother’s quilt or your native language.

Nell Dickerson

RM: Were there any special processes or post-processing styles or techniques used in the making of these photographs, anything you can share?

NELL: The magic is in the mix. I use about 5 different software programs for postproduction. Since you are from Louisiana, consider it a secret recipe for a hot sauce.

RM: What sort of equipment did you use? Did the choice to use that equipment influence your photographic or artistic choices?

NELL: The cameras changed over the course of the project. They were secondary to the vision…a means to an end and they did not dictate what I photographed. However, the capture was digital. The most important tool, the ultimate weapon, and the one I cannot live without, is a Wacom Cintiq monitor. It makes the entire work flow right-brained, spontaneous and artistic like painting.

House, circa 1843, Fayette County, Tennessee. Nell Dickerson

RM: Can you tell our readers how this ties into what some photographers might call your “day job” as an architect?

NELL: I have learned more about design and construction from photographing these buildings than I ever learned in school or from pushing papers behind a desk.

RM: Is this book in some ways a culmination of everything you’ve done in your career, or been trained to do, or everything you’ve learned? Or a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to mix and match it all together?

NELL: I am living an incredibly rich, interesting and full life. I’ve done and am doing lots of creative things. Architecture is the mother of the arts and I have many design, films, books and multi-media projects simmering on the stove. This book is just one of many.

***

To see more of Nell’s work and a preview of the book visit her website.

Ray Mikell serves as chief contributor for the New Orleans Photo Alliance’s blog. This is the first in a planned series of photographer interviews for the PhotoNOLA blog.

Exhibitions will run for the entire month of December, with openings on the first and second Saturdays of the month. Portfolio reviews and festival programming will take place from December 8-11, 2011.

Jessica Ingram: A Civil Rights Memorial. NOPA Gallery, PhotoNOLA 2010

Exhibitions Listing Form

If you have a photography related show lined up for December in New Orleans, please submit the information here, so we can include it on the PhotoNOLA website and brochures.
- Deadline August 1

Venues Seeking Artists

If you have a venue which would like to host an exhibition during December and want us to help pair you with an appropriate artist please complete this form.
- Deadline July 1

Artists Seeking Venues

If you are a photographer interested in showing work during PhotoNOLA please complete this form and we will contact you if we can find an appropriate space for your work. Please note before applying that expenses will not be covered by the festival, and in some cases artists may need to install their own work.
- Deadline July 1

Questions? Please contact the exhibition coordinators:
Andrea Caldwell (andrea@photonola.org) 504-975-4002
or Veronica Hartowicz (volunteer@photonola.org)