The exhibit Oraien Catledge: Cabbagetown, now on view at Opal Gallery, displays 30 of some 50,000 images taken by photographer Oraien Catledge in the small Atlanta neighborhood from the late 1970s through the ’90s. Here, Catledge discusses a few of the works in the show and some from his broader collection with CL’s Chad Radford and Opal Gallery director Connie Lewis.
ORAIEN CATLEDGE: The photographer holds up one of his images of Cabbagetown as he knew it more than 20 years ago.
Oraien Catledge first stumbled upon Cabbagetown while sitting on his couch one evening in the fall of 1978. He was flipping through the local news channels when he came across a town meeting in which citizens were discussing the fate of their community. The nearly 100-year-old Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills had closed their doors for the last time, and a lot of the locals – vestiges of an honest-to-goodness factory town that stood in the mills’ shadows – were destitute. Many of the people living in Cabbagetown in the late ’70s were direct descendents of the workers imported from Appalachia to work at the mills since their construction in 1881. But much of the property would soon be up for sale to the rest of the city, and it seemed that the tight-knit community would unravel. “As they used to say, that was preee-sactly the moment that I learned about Cabbagetown,” Catledge chuckles through a bushy, snowy white mustache.
Catledge, 81, is an Oxford, Miss., native who moved to Atlanta in 1969 while working as a regional consultant for the American Association for the Blind. “I wasn’t a photographer back then and I knew nothing about photography, but I had an urge to do something creative,” he says. “I tried painting but the canvases just wouldn’t dry fast enough, so I went out and I got a camera.”
Catledge is legally blind, but dismisses his condition as a disadvantage. In a soft, grandfatherly voice, he says, “Oh … I can see a lot better than most people think I can.”
Continue Reading “Photographer Oraien Catledge remembers Cabbagetown”
(Photos by Joeff Davis)
"Frame 18," from the Explosure series, 2008
In photographer Tierney Gearon’s latest series EXPLOSURE, currently on view at Jackson Fine Art, boulders are rendered lighter than air, shadows crawl toward the sun, and ghostly forms cheerfully mingle with the living. “Frame 18″ watches two worlds collide within a single image: A gray-haired businessman gasps as the sidewalk dematerializes into thin air, while a bikini-clad swimmer stands unaware that her local pool has just merged realities with Wall Street. Double-vision continues throughout the series as each photo unites two scenes shot in different locations ranging from Cape Town, South Africa, to Kanchipuram, India.
A busy single mother and internationally known artist, Gearon took a recess from her life traveling the globe to give a sold-out lecture at the High Museum during last month’s Atlanta Celebrates Photography festival. The Atlanta native caused a stir in 2001 with her exhibit I Am a Camera at London’s Saatchi Gallery. Some viewers bristled at the work, which included shots of her children playing in the nude, while other voices including the Guardian newspaper, launched campaigns to protect her from censorship.
Continue Reading “EXPLOSURE brings the world home”
(Photo Courtesy Tierney Gearon)
iPOD, iPHONE … iBEAUTIFUL: Terry Stephens' photo response to "Water," the group assignment for Week No. 2.
The official ACP blog reports that What’s Happening Now: A Cell Phone Photography Project will be the festival’s second largest exhibition this year in terms of artist participation. That means: more than 45 photographers + camera phones = lots of cool photos.
Coproduced by Christian Bradley West and Susan Todd-Raque, the show is limited exclusively to images shot “on the go” that were contributed over the course of eight weeks of episodic “homework” assignments. What’s Happening Now debuts at Cherrylion Studios this Sat. Sept. 19, from 5-10 p.m. Click here for directions.
Meanwhile, Christian Bradley West’s CelphPortrait at Eyedrum is another cell phone project, albeit of a more focused and introspective kind. The show returns to Eyedrum’s Small Gallery this weekend, and continues through Oct. 10.
(Photo courtesy ChristianBradleyWest.com)
FOLLOW THE LEADER: "Germantown, Tennessee"
Like the photographer himself, the characters in Alec Soth’s Black Line of Woods are mostly outsiders and wild men. As part of the High Museum’s Picturing the South commissioned works series, Soth’s images hopscotch through an epic Southern landscape from Texas to Kentucky to Georgia. Soth bypasses major thoroughfares and big cities and instead concentrates on the bearded survivalists and rugged hermits he finds on back roads and in dense woods. Through Soth’s 8-by-10-view camera lens, the South emerges as idiosyncratic, peculiar, and seething with the dark undercurrent of human frailties played out on a geological scale.
“E.S. Knoxville, Tennessee, 2006” is emblematic of Soth’s considerable powers of perception. Clad entirely in camouflage, a lone figure stands facing away from the camera on a sort of ridge among a grove of chokeberry trees. Debris litters the ground around his feet as he looks down on a desolate streetscape barely discernable below. The visible signage — Waffle House, Shell Station, Adult Video — signify every roadside truck stop from Biloxi to Blacksburg. It’s impossible to tell where personal narrative ends and cultural anthropology begins.
Continue reading “Alec Soth ventures into the Woods“
(Photo by Alec Soth)
Those fellas at Art Relish have been picking up the slack in coverage at the High Museum. I’m curious to see Alec Soth’s entry to Picturing the South, an ongoing program of regionally-inspired photography commissioned by the museum. Soth’s title, Black Line of Woods, is a quotation by Flannery O’Connor; his images are intended to capture something essential about the South. And for that reason, I appreciate Jason Parker’s question: Does it matter that the photographer was born in the North?
Art Relish recently shot another video on Richard Misrach’s exhibit, On the Beach, which shows concurrently with Monet’s Water Lilies. Both Monet and Misrach close this Sunday, August 23. Check the High’s website for more info.
Carl Martin is the photographer behind last summer’s exhibit curated by Samuel Fogarino, the writer more widely known as the drummer for Interpol. In his series shot in Athens, Ga., and in his Men of Georgia, Martin’s photos have a consistent aura. His subjects remain locked in the middle ground, where they engage the viewer in a moment of arrested intimacy. It’s as if we were about to make friends, but somehow can’t. Like this lady, a regular backyard empress. What’s her story?
However, his latest series will take a different route. Opening this Thurs. Aug. 20 from 6-9 p.m. at Opal Gallery, Carl Martin’s Children comprises portraits of children ranging from ten months to eight years old. By seizing the imagery of the classic “billfold snapshot,” Martin hopes to discover the “nuance of perspective” of each child as an individual — rather than merely as someone else’s kid. He further challenges us to consider: What do these pictures reveal about our culture as a whole?
(It also might be interesting to compare Martin’s show with Craig Hawkins’ anti-portraits, currently on view at Mason Murer Fine Art.)
(Photo by Carl Martin/flyer courtesy Opal Gallery)
Two boys take in the Photovoice Project at Mechanicsville
On July 25, Mechanicsville’s Rosa Burney Park became the unlikely setting of a sprawling work of public art some three years in the making. Under a blazing sun and amid the pulse of blaring hip-hop, Neighborhood Planning Unit-V’s Photovoice Project: Taking It to the Streets stood as the latest installment in an ongoing photography project documenting large swaths of the district, which comprises Mechanicsville, Pittsburgh, Adair Park, Summerhill and Peoplestown. Since 2007, residents have steadily documented the area’s blighted, abandoned properties in hopes of making visible a quality-of-life problem invisible even to many within the communities it affects. According to the Neighborhood Data Advisory Group, 42 percent of NPU-V’s properties sit vacant. The event was both a celebration of the work as well as a call to arms to change the character of a neighborhood.
The Dirty Truth Campaign — a grassroots community organization devoted to improving the neighborhoods’ physical conditions — has been developing Photovoice since the project’s inception. The group distributed cameras in schools and to neighborhood groups and cultivated the results. Working with artist Lisa Tuttle, the event’s organizers lined Rosa Burney Park’s tennis courts with dozens of large-scale photos snapped mostly by neighborhood middle and high school youths. The photos told the often tragic, always dispiriting stories of tires strewn across front lawns and burned-out shells of homes claimed by garbage and weedy overgrowth. Many are near Parks Middle School in Pittsburgh, where the photographers pass them daily on their way to and from school.
Continue reading “NPU-V shows Atlanta the Dirty Truth”
(Photo by Alan Friedman)
Above: A trailer for Kiss Me Deadly. The 1955 film “channels post-war nuclear paranoia into a noir that is as uncompromising in its cynicism as in its artistic vision,” according to Livia Bloom of the Nantucket Film Festival. Bloom is one of many film experts who contributed this week to Films at the High, the High Museum’s entry into the ever-swelling ranks of Atlanta arts and culture blogs. As Curator of Films Linda Dubler writes in the film blog’s inaugural post:
Films at the High wants to solidify our ‘cool-kid’ status, so we’re trying something new this summer. Using this WordPress space, we’ll treat your eyes to top ten lists, Curator’s film picks and even some YouTube Film Festivals.
The Films at the High blog is currently running a theme on apocalyptic movies, in honor of the High’s current photography exhibition by Richard Misrach, On the Beach (on view through August 23). Of course, Misrach’s photos aren’t doomsday pictures. His artist statement merely points to 9/11 as the cultural milieu surrounding and informing his imagery. There’s a sense of dread that viewers may or may not attribute to any particular disaster.
Fortunately, the blog’s also an opportunity for staffers at the High to sport their low-brow credentials. Top picks include Shaun of the Dead and Resident Evil, as well as more sophisticated, artsy titles.
NOT JUST NOSTALGIA: A photo from Michael Varisco's 'Land Marks' series at Opal Gallery.
The VESTIGES Project is a collective of artists and writers based in New Orleans, a “vestigial burg” that, as one member puts it, has become “the biggest vestige-display territory” in the nation. But what’s a vestige, you ask? Don’t worry: I had to look it up, too.
Let’s ask the wise and almighty InterWeb:
ves⋅tige
-noun
1. a mark, trace, or visible evidence of something that is no longer
2. a surviving evidence or remainder of some condition, practice, etc
In the original Latin, vestige referred to a footprint. In biology, the term could be used to specifically describe the human tailbone, i.e. evolutionary features that are, for lack of a better word, obsolete. But in the context of Opal Gallery’s newest photography exhibition, you can think of it as the dwindling footprints of a city’s evolution, or, specifically, the evolution of New Orleans and what it means to live there both pre- and post-Katrina.
Continue reading “Land Marks: For the love of books and photography” »
BODY OF ART: See more photos like this at clatl.com/photos
We know you’ve been thinking to yourself, “CL should create a space for all the awesome photos they shoot.” And if you weren’t thinking that, then all the visual desires you never even knew you had have just been fulfilled.
We now have a spot where you can access all the latest galleries shot each week, a new Photo of the Day posted (you guessed it!) every day, and new videos going up every week. You can also check out the thousands of images uploaded by your fellow Atlantans to the CL Flickr feed or read up on what the deal was with each week’s Time and Place photo.
There’s international photo and video news, tidbits and gear updates, along with info on upcoming Atlanta photo community meet-ups and shoot-outs.
Missed the TV On the Radio concert? We’ve got the photos to make you feel just a little better about it.
Wondering how the hell they get all that sand out of the Decatur Square after the Decatur Beach Party? We’ve got the lowdown on that through video interviews.
Check it out at clatl.com/photos_video.
Of course, we want to hear your feedback. So give us your joys, your grievances, your Atlanta photo knowledge! Send it all our way to photos@cln.com.
(Photo by Alan Friedman)
OUTSIDE THE BOX? Bystanders stand puzzled by Kristina Solomoukha's anti-monument, the 'Mind the Gap Fountain'
Atlanta Celebrates Photography announced last week that Le Flash, a one-night event of light-based art and performances in Castleberry Hill, will be the official launch of this year’s ACP festival. Check out Cinque Hicks’ preview feature of last year’s Le Flash, as well as a few highlights from BurnAway.org.
Le Flash’s new website launched today, including an updated call for artist proposals. Keep in mind: If you’re interested in entering an art exhibition, installation, or street performance, the deadline is Fri., July 10.
(Photo by Jeremy Abernathy)
Forgive the short notice: If you love photography — or French culture — you should definitely check out Opal Gallery’s new exhibition, Foto Povera 5: Atlanta. Thankfully, Opal’s centrally located L5P storefront should make it easy for you to drop by. The reception is tonight, June 4, from 6-9 p.m.!
More from Opal:
This informal collective of French and Atlanta-based artists brings together talented photographers who take an alternative approach to their medium by using a variety of of non-traditional and “toy cameras” such as sténopé, Holga, Diana, and Brownie box. The images on display represent a unique translation of photography with cameras that are often referred to as “primitive” in the modern world of digital technology. By embracing the constraints of these non-traditional cameras, they aim to capture a precariousness and spontaneity that they believe to be much greater than the resulting image.
Need more reasons to go? I personally expect the opening to be at least partially bilingual. Opal owner Constance Lewis (featured in our recent Happy Issue) has several old connections to France. And although the show’s curator credit goes to Yannick Vigouroux, some of Lewis’ own photography will appear alongside works by other members of the Foto Povera collective. Even if you aren’t a raving Francophile, the reception still promises a unique experience.
(Photo by Bruno Debon)
Dear neighbors,
I’d like to draw your attention to two WonderRoot exhibitions by emerging artists. I say this, of course, keeping in mind my typical distrust of the phrase, emerging artist: When exactly does a creative person, whether a musician, writer, film director, or visual artist start and stop emerging? I suppose, as long as the term retains marketing value for you, you could technically begin as an emerging artist at birth (emerging, literally), and then finally dispense with the label when it’s no longer of use … at the nursing home.
Semantics aside — if you LUV ATL like I do — you should definitely check out WonderRoot’s schedule for the weekend. Today, May 28 from 5-7 p.m. at Eyedrum Art and Music Gallery, volunteer instructors including photographer Nicole Akstein will present a body of photos by students from Sequoya Middle School. The program was a cooperative, educational initiative between WonderRoot and CPACS, the Center for Pan Asian Community Services, a local nonprofit that offers social and health services to immigrants, refugees, and racial-ethnic minorities. If you ask me, middle school students certainly qualify as emerging artists.
On Sat., May 30, beginning around 4 p.m., stop by WonderRoot headquarters on Memorial Drive for the WonderRoot One-Year Anniversary, celebrating 365 days since the official opening of the community center. The event coincides with an all-media exhibition titled I Love Atlanta, which put out a call to artists to express their undying affection for dear ‘ole A. (Additionally, I hear there may be special shenanigans involving cofounder Chris Appleton….) Steal the show flyer here for more info on musical guests.
For more local arts events, visit clatl.com/events or, check today’s visual arts To Do List at BurnAway.org.
(Photo courtesy WonderRoot/Thoughtmarker)
