Photography exhibit offers new way of seeing the South
For accessAtlanta
Thursday, October 09, 2008
“CONTEMPORARY SOUTHERN PHOTOGRAPHERS” at Atlanta Photography Group Gallery offers yet another of the nonprofit group’s juried shows of well-known and emerging photographers.
Dana S. Kemp’s “World’s First Baby Boomer Tells All” series of vintage photographs, accompanied by descriptions of her earliest boyfriends, has been exhibited in different venues, but never quite in this depth and degree of piquancy. New Orleans ca. 1970 was even stranger than some of us thought.
EMILY GÓMEZ
‘Nancy Ward’s Grave, Benton, Tennessee, 2007,’ shows the grave the Chattanooga DAR marked with the words ‘Nancy Ward, Princess and Prophetess of the Cherokee Nation.’
"Contemporary Southern Photographers." Through Oct. 24. Wednesday through Saturday, noon-4 p.m. Atlanta Photography Group Gallery, 75 Bennett St., Space B-1. 404-605-0605.
Tammy Mercure’s photos from towns around the Great Smoky Mountains include such moments of surrealism as a dinosaur head protruding from foliage between a wastebasket and a door marked “Employees Only.”
Emily Gómez’s images of bland-looking bits of land- or townscape look very different when the captions explain their associations with the South’s Indian nations. One photo shows the grave that the Chattanooga Daughters of the American Revolution marked with the words “Nancy Ward, Princess and Prophetess of the Cherokee Nation, the Pocahontas of Tennessee, the Constant Friend of the American Pioneer, Born 1738 - Died 1822.”
The exhibition’s wondrous mix of alternating superficiality and seriousness is completed by Kelly Embry’s documentary series about a young single mother battling cervical cancer, and by John Elliott’s sensitive glimpses of everyday moments in the South and beyond.
The choices of photographs made by Britt Salvesen of Arizona’s Center for Creative Photography prove that sometimes it takes an outsider to get past regional stereotypes and get down to imaginative cases.
