lake martin sunset timelapse #2 from Kristie Cornell on Vimeo.
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His work has been published in three collections. Perhaps his best known work is Juke Joint (1990), a collection of 58 color saturated long exposures of road houses of the Mississippi Delta. Hand painted signs, makeshift furniture and decor, and the faces of the customers of these bars tell the story of the delta blues. One of the photos in this collection, Turk's Place, is featured on the cover of Lucinda Williams' 1998 Grammy award winning album Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. The graffiti captured in others, including Freedom Village Juke, inspired the lyrics of Williams' song "2 kool 2 Be 4-Gotten" on the same album.
Riverside Lounge, by Birney Imes
Whispering Pines (1994), is the result of documenting the final years of a bar/cafe, and its owner. Imes depicts the decline of the establishment, and through his photos shows the intimacy that developed between owner Blume Triplett, his employees, his customers, and even Imes himself.
Blume, New Year's Eve, by Birney Imes
Partial to Home (1994) is a series of black and white photographs, mainly portraits, from a ten year period, many of which were taken while researching locations for Juke Joint. This book is part of a series published by the Smithsonian Institution called Photographers at Work.
Joyce at Sugarhill, by Birney Imes
Imes' work has been shown nationally and internationally, including three exhibits in 2011 at the Odgen Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans, showcasing prints from each of his three publications. While he doesn't maintain a formal web presence, select photographs can be seen online at the websites for various galleries that represent Imes, including the Rose Gallery of Santa Monica, CA, and Jackson Fine Art of Atlanta GA.
]]>lake martin sunset time lapse from Kristie Cornell on Vimeo.
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Broken Glass, the new album, is a collection of seven original songs and a hauntingly beautiful cover of The Tennessee Waltz. Listen to the entire album and keep up with show dates on Guillory's website. Download the album via CDBaby or Itunes, order a copy of the CD from CDBaby, or pick one up from Johnson's Boucanière if you're lucky enough to be in Lafayette. (And while you're there, grab a Campos Special. You won't be sorry.)
Photos on CD cover by me!
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Today, I'd like to introduce you to a blog called Inside Spaces. Run by Adie Reed, this site brings you into a space and shares it with you through Adie's eyes. In the interest of full disclosure, I know Adie. She is, in fact, my best friend of over 16 years. We met when we had a class together while pursuing undergraduate degrees. The science major and the English major, helping each other through a French for reading class. Since then, our friendship has survived a couple of cross country moves, letter writing, emails, yearly visits, and the occasional (but uncomfortably common) near disasters in the wilderness. She has been a constant source of encouragement for me in my endeavors, and I try to do the same for her in hers.
Adie highlights different types of spaces- mostly homes, but also businesses and museums- and shows you the things about those spaces she finds interesting. Beautiful details that might be overlooked, or certainly not noticed in a few photos of an entire room, are showcased. She brings the owner to life through the things they've collected and put on display in their personal spaces.
It would be fair to draw a comparison between what Adie does with that of The Selby, but I find some distinct differences. I'll save most of my opinions on Selby for some other time, but I will say that I know people who LOVE his work, and people who HATE it. (You know who you are.) I fall somewhere closer to indifferent, with a slight distaste for it. What I prefer about Adie's work is that rather than focusing on the owners in their spaces (though she includes a portrait or two), she concentrates on details and lets them define the owner. I find Selby seems to let the owner define themselves, which often comes across as a bit of a staged version of that person. When looking at Selby's blog I find myself rolling my eyes and thinking, 'How does this person take him/herself seriously?' while with Inside Spaces, I often think, 'Man, I'd really like to hang out with this person.’
And that's the difference. Selby brings you into the homes of the famous and the beautiful. Artists. Designers. People who stage their homes deliberately, based on some idea of what they want to be, and who have the resources to do so. Adie brings you into the homes of real people. Normal people. People who do what they can with what they have, and make it work.
Check out some of my favorite Inside Spaces posts- Adie's visit to my house, our visit to the Ogden Museum in New Orleans (the same visit where I fell in love with Jack Spencer's photography), her visit to my friends Gwen's and Allison's houses, and her visit to Scott's boat!
]]>And this love isn’t limited to family photos. I’ve spent hours and hours rifling through the online photography archives of the Library of Congress. My favorites come from the Lomax Collection, the Farm Security Administration photos, and anything from Louisiana. I’ll look through boxes of cabinet cards and tintypes at flea markets, and occasionally come home with a few odd portraits that I just can’t leave behind.
I’ve also become fascinated with specific types of vintage photograph collections. Victorian era Memento mori have always interested me, including mourning jewelry, hair wreaths, and particularly post-mortem photography. A wonderful collection of these photographs has been assembled by The Thanatos Archive, and some can even be purchased through their etsy store. I also get a good laugh when I come across a photo with people’s faces removed.
In the past couple of years, I’ve become a fan of photographs of immersion baptism. Probably the first image like this I remember seeing was Elemore Morgan Sr.’s Baptism at Dawson Creek. Over the years I’ve seen many photos of these events, generally a shot of a preacher in the process of submerging the faithful in a creek or lake. But it wasn’t until I saw a group portrait style photograph of an immersion baptism that I became really interested in them.
It started when I went up to Shreveport, LA, to visit my dear friend Kay. While there, she told me she had a gift for me, and brought out a 16x20 inch black and white photograph that she had gotten enlarged for me. It was a photo of a creek bed, the banks of which were lined with people in their Sunday best, as far as the eye could see. A row of about fifteen men were standing shoulder to shoulder, across the creek, some up to their chests in water. We spent a good bit of time that evening looking at the faces in that photograph and trying to unravel the mystery of why the photo was taken.
The best part of the whole thing was the story behind how Kay had gotten the photograph in the first place. [Kay, please correct me if I’m remembering any of this story wrong!] During her tenure as a high school English teacher in north Louisiana, the school decided to hold a garage sale to raise money to put on the senior prom. Students were encouraged to bring in donations of items from home to sell, and boxes upon boxes poured in. While sorting the items for display, Kay came across a photo album that held old family photos. The album also contained one loose photograph, stuck between two of the pages- the photo Kay had just given me. Knowing that the album had probably ended up in the box of donations by mistake, and that the owner would someday lament its loss, she tried without success to figure out who it belonged to. It sat on her desk for the rest of that year, but no one claimed it. She then brought it to the school librarian for safe keeping, but kept that loose photograph of those men standing in the creek that had captured her interest. Unfortunately, the school library later burned, but the baptism photo remained safe in Kay’s possession. She kept it all those years, and when she finally decided to have it scanned and enlarged to hang in her home, she made a second copy knowing I would like it as well.
I loved it, and brought it home intending to frame and hang it right away. Time, of course, got away from me, and I’ve only recently gotten around to that. But right at the same time, I came across a book called Take Me to the Water: Immersion Baptism in Vintage Music and Photography 1890-1950. The book contains photographs from the collection of Jim Linderman, as well as a CD containing gospel and folk song recordings from the same era. When I first saw the photograph at Kay’s, I wasn’t sure what the photograph was depicting. The general consensus was that it was an immersion baptism, but we weren’t entirely sure. After seeing Linderman’s collection, I am certain. And while the “action” shots of the baptisms are amazing, the portrait style photos in the collection are the ones I love. Something about a group of people, dressed in their best clothes and standing along or submerged in a stream, with no obvious clues as to what is happening, is utterly intriguing. Seen out of context, as I saw my photograph that day at Kay’s, it is strange and beautiful. Trying to decipher the circumstances of the image encourages you to spend a bit more time studying the faces, the clothing, body language, and to relate to the individuals involved rather than just see the image as documentation of the event.
One of these photographers is Adam Jahiel. In the summer of 2000, with one semester of graduate school under my belt, I headed west with a professor and a few fellow students to spend almost eight weeks camping and doing geologic field work, mostly measuring the orientations of thousands of cracks in the rocks of the Bighorn Basin in northwest Wyoming. Somewhere along the way, I picked up a copy of the May/June 2000 issue of Photo Insider Magazine. Jahiel was featured on the cover, along with an article about his project, The Last Cowboy, in which he spent years documenting ranchers and cowboys in the Great Basin region of the western United States.
Originally drawn to pick up the magazine because of the gorgeous cover photo of TJ Brown, I became more interested because of the proximity of the Great Basin to where I was spending my summer. And, if that wasn’t enough, my love for Jahiel’s work was cemented when I read that he makes his home along the outer edge of the Bighorn Basin, just across the Bighorn Mountains from where I set up my tent and camped for nearly a month.
Flipping through the article, and much later, after finding Jahiel’s website, the photos that spoke most to me included his portraits- of Riley Cleaver, Wahoo Bill, Shane Sanders, Fritz and Snooks, and Riley Brown; and his photographs (I might argue that these are also portraits) of the horses these men were working, particularly- Remuda, Spanish Ranch, Remuda #7, Horse Shadows, Remuda #5, Building a Loop, and Top Hand.
Throughout this series, Jahiel uses the harsh setting of the barren desert landscape to his advantage. The images are strikingly beautiful, but they don’t hide the reality of the hard work these men are doing. Jahiel captures the pervasive dust, the ominous skies, the long shadows, and indeed, the cowboys’ work itself, to tell the true story of the ranching life in the Great Basin.
Jahiel’s work is not limited to cowboys. He was the photographer for the 1987 Titanic Expedition, has photographed the people and landscapes of Kyrgyzstan, and was chosen as the Wyoming representative of the 2009 50 States Project.
John Griggs and Maggie, by Adam Jahiel
