Can you feel it? The city is coming back to life. Music venues are booking shows. Restaurants have more customers than they know what to do with. Popcorn is popping at the movie theaters and kids are whizzing down the waterslide at the pool. Hugs are back in vogue.
COVID isn’t gone, but locally, the last few weeks have seen cases plummet and stay low. Charlottesville and Albemarle recorded less than 50 COVID cases in the entire month of June. (At our peak in February, the area saw 250 new cases in a single day.) The local vaccination rate is among the highest in the state.
The last year has changed us all, casting our society’s weaknesses and inequities into a new and harsher light. Celebrating a “return to normal” would mean squandering an opportunity to turn the hard lessons of the pandemic into meaningful change.
We can celebrate each other, though, and we can celebrate the chance to be together. The photos that follow offer a glimpse at the city’s joyful return to togetherness this spring.
You’re never too old to boogie: Seniors cut a rug at The Center at Belvedere. Photo: Tristan Williams. Foodies flock to the bustling farmers’ market at IX Art Park. Photo: Tristan Williams. Chamomile and Whiskey perform in front of a packed house at Fridays After Five. Photo: Cole Fischer. A group raises a glass—or, rather, a can—while enjoying The Fitzroy’s bubbly atmosphere. Photo: Tristan Williams.Diners at The White Spot chow down on the intimate hole-in-the-wall’s famous burgers. Photo: John Robinson.At-home haircuts are a thing of the past for the customers sharpening up at Ederra Salon. Photo: Tristan Williams.In the Heights lights up the big screen at Violet Crown. Photo: Tristan Williams.Splash! Much to the delight of local kids—and their parents—the city pools have reopened at last. Photo: Tristan Williams.
“‘This Familiar Space’ is two years in the making, and the dozens of works that comprise the show (including this collage) were made by artists here in Charlottesville and in Besançon, France, one of Charlottesville’s Sister Cities. Image courtesy of Stacey Evans
One of the first assignments Stacey Evans gives her photography class is to visit the same place at different times throughout the day, a few days in a row. She tasks her PVCC students with noticing the light, how it’s different minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day. If Monday’s morning light is soft, Tuesday’s might be bright, and Wednesday’s might be grayed by rain.
It’s a practical lesson for an art that relies on light not just for composition but for mood, for atmosphere, for meaning. It’s also a rather practical (and sometimes difficult) lesson for life: Change is constant.
Change is also a major theme in Evans’ own photography. She ruminated on it in “Ways of Seeing,” a series of collages from photos shot through train car windows and exhibited at Second Street Gallery in April 2017. It’s present again in Evans’ current SSG exhibition, “This Familiar Space/Cet Espace Familier,” which opened online last week.
“‘This Familiar Space’ is two years in the making, and the dozens of works that comprise the show were made by artists here in Charlottesville and in Besançon, France, one of Charlottesville’s sister cities.
Evans served as artist, producer, and curator for the show, which is divided into four unique, but related, groups of works. Evans planned to mount it on the walls of SSG’s Dové Gallery, until the space closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and she had to envision and execute it for the web.
One of the photos in the “Daily Muse” series. Photo by Stacey Evans
The first segment, “Daily Muse,” is a series of 11 photographs of the same rooftop view in Besançon, taken by Evans on a 2018 Sister Cities Commission trip. Capturing this view from her hotel room became a routine for Evans on the trip, and though the visual perspective is technically the same, none of the photos are. The sky differs, sometimes drastically and sometimes subtly, from image to image, affecting the colors of the building below, the shadows, and the overall tone of the photographs. In the bottom center space of the grid, Evans has written, “This too shall pass,” putting to words what the eyes and the mind have already acknowledged, consciously or not.
Evans expects the text might resonate deeply with viewers right now, as we’re all eager for the pandemic to pass. But, she says, we’re not always so open to change: We like our routines, too. And the set of photographs presented in “Daily Muse” shows how routine and change are not necessarily opposite, but complementary, co-existent. It’s about “understanding that things aren’t permanent. Change does happen, and [you have to be] okay with change, because if you get stuck in your ways, I don’t see that as a good thing,” either.
Another image from “Daily Muse.” Photo by Stacey Evans
Evans’ role shifts a bit in “Look to See.” She made photographs in both Charlottesville and Besançon, and students altered them into collages. She had Charlottesville High School students start a batch, then brought them to Besançon for Lycée Louis Pasteur students to finish; the Louis Pasteur kids started a new set of collages that Evans brought back to Charlottesville to be completed at CHS.
Evans also served in a production role for the third piece, “The Ones We Can Still Save,” a sculpture and video collaboration between Charlottesville-based artist Nina Frances Burke and Besançon-based artist Gabriel Hopson. Each artist gave Evans a small package of materials (the one requirement: that it fit in Evans’ suitcase) for the other to use. Hopson, who is diabetic, sent Burke an insulin pen full of the life-saving medication, something he can easily access (and even spare) thanks to French health care, something that is difficult, sometimes impossible, for people to access in the U.S. health care system. The pen was full but unusable, and Burke embedded it, inaccessible, in a nest-like sculpture. Together with Hopson’s video (we won’t give away all the details), it’s a comment on the differences between the American and French health care systems.
One component of “The Ones We Can Still Save,” a collaboration between Charlottesville artist Nina Frances Burke and Besancon artist Gabriel Hopson. Image courtesy the artists
The fourth piece, “The Light Between,” is a video collage Evans made of both moving and still footage of daily life in Besançon and Charlottesville. It’s full of marked differences (architecture, language) and similarities (going to work, dining al fresco) among life in both places. One of Evans’ favorite juxtapositions is around the 1:40 mark—note the power lines in Charlottesville, and the absence of them, in Besançon.
Across all of the works in “This Familiar Space/Cet Espace Familier” there’s evidence of connection of people across time and space. “That’s always been in the show,” says Evans, though the theme might project a bit more right now.
Recognizing the ways in which we’re all connected—and how our own decisions can affect others—is important, says Evans, who considers herself “a global citizen first and an American second.” That realization can complicate our constant internal, highly personal, negotiation between change and routine, already a delicate balance to strike. For Evans, the secret to staying grounded is looking up, thinking about the ever-shifting sky, and “the umbrella that connects us all,” she says.
In “Time to Get Ready: fotografía social,” a National Museum of Mexican Art exhibit on view at The Fralin Museum of Art, you will find all the classic elements one expects in a “good” photography show. Maria Varela’s photographs are compositionally sophisticated and emotionally intimate. They are candids, yet they look like movie stills. They look like they were taken by someone who is very serious about all the aesthetic choices that make up the art of photography.
But Varela is quick to note that she is not an artist, nor is she a journalist. One of the few Latinx activists involved in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, Varela was an organizer who started taking photographs for the educational materials she was producing for black workers in the South. Like Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders in the movement, she was motivated by her religious beliefs to take an active role in dismantling white supremacy.
She began her career organizing for the Young Christian Students, a progressive Catholic advocacy group informed by liberation theology. “Which holds,” Varela said at a recent talk at The Fralin, “that as Christians, our vocation is to be actively engaged in dismantling racism, economic injustice, anti-democratic forces, and unjust wars.”
Through this work, she met members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. SNCC was black-led, but it welcomed any activist who was “willing to face the dangers.” The largely Baptist committee wanted Varela to go to Selma, where a Catholic priest was leading voter registration efforts. She balked.
“Me to Selma, that has a nutso sheriff that would just as soon kill a movement worker as to go through the paperwork to put him in jail? I did not want to do this,” says Varela. But the leadership and mission of SNCC inspired her. “I didn’t want to make a fool of myself and reveal what a chicken I was to these veterans of several dangerous campaigns.” She agreed to go.
When Varela arrived in the fall of 1963, activists were focused on teaching black adults how to read. Literacy tests had been devised to keep them from voting in Alabama, and so Varela was tasked with developing an adult literacy program to be run out of the St. Elizabeth Parish. The reading materials that existed for adult learners were insulting on many levels. Primarily they were about middle-class white people going through their embarrassingly bourgeois day, and the plots (if you could call them that) were juvenile. The books were illustrated and made people feel like they were reading children’s books.
Varela wanted to create materials that were appropriate and motivating. While organizing in Alabama and Mississippi, she’d learned that people were hungry for information on how to better their lives. In addition to voting, they wanted to know about housing cooperatives and agriculture. The Civil Rights Act’s passage in 1964 did away with literacy tests, so Varela proposed to SNCC leadership that she make educational and training materials about people who had organized successful community projects. She wanted to showcase everyday black leaders making social or economic change.
The story of how a group of okra farmers formed their own agricultural co-op in Batesville, Mississippi, formed the basis of Something Of Our Own, Varela’s first self-published book. It gave readers an idea of what went into starting a co-op, as well as the racism they might encounter while trying to create a black-run business. Illustrated with photographs from the field, it was such a big hit that leaders at mass meetings begged organizers not to pass them out too early, or else they’d lose the attention of their audience.
As she continued to publish, she recruited other SNCC photographers to take images for her pamphlets. But they got sick of doing her favors, and suggested she learn to take pictures herself. She trained with Matt Heron, who ran the Southern Documentary Project in New Orleans. There Varela discovered the work of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, who photographed migrants and workers in the 1930s.
“I never thought of myself as capable of creating such compelling images,” she says. “I just wanted to be able to make practical photos, useful to movement organizers. But the Lange and Evans images were ever-present ghosts in the darkroom, challenging me to see differently.”
From that point on, Varela would organize and take pictures. She photographed several marches, including the 1966 Meredith March against Fear, where the term “Black Power” was first heard. She documented some truly significant moments, all while being targeted by sheriffs and the Ku Klux Klan. Later, she worked with Reies López Tijerina and the Land Grant movement in New Mexico, and spent 45 years helping southwestern Latinx communities establish sustainable farms. Photos of this work can also be seen at The Fralin.
It’s hard to get the full story of Varela’s life from panels on museum walls. Her backstory is essential to understanding and appreciating her work, and her photography is a means to an end, a way of creating images of resistance for the resisters. With that in mind, the beauty of Varela’s images seems like an unexpected blessing. But maybe it’s not so unexpected: The goal of a life spent in service is to leave the world more beautiful than it was before. “Time to Get Ready: fotografía social” is evidence that Maria Varela did just that.
Social justice activist Maria Varela’s “Time to Get Ready: fotografía social” is at The Fralin Museum of Art through January 5.
“Simply: The Black Towns” is Jamelle Bouie’s first-ever photography exhibition, on view at The Jefferson School through July 13. Photo: Eze Amos
An all-black town.
An all-black town? It was a stray mention in a book on the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, but Jamelle Bouie was intrigued.
An all-black town. “It got stuck in my craw,” says Bouie.
He found a few local news articles, a mini documentary film, and a couple books on the subject—the dozens of towns founded in Oklahoma by free blacks who’d migrated west after Emancipation—but that was it. For Bouie, a journalist whose work focuses on, among other things, politics and race in America, that wasn’t enough. He needed to know more.
In March of this year, he flew to Oklahoma to see these towns for himself.
Over the course of 72 hours, Bouie visited 12 of the 13 surviving all-black towns and photographed 10 of them. Fourteen of those photos are on view at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center through July 13.
“Simply: The Black Towns” is Bouie’s first-ever photography exhibition, and his own contribution to the awareness of a history that’s largely unknown.
Rosenwald School in Lima, Oklahoma. Photo: Jamelle Bouie.
Bouie himself is pretty well-known as a writer. After fellowships at The Nation magazine and The American Prospect, he was a staff writer at The Daily Beast and later chief political correspondent for Slate. Currently, he’s a political analyst for CBS News (perhaps you’ve seen him on the “Face the Nation” roundtable) and an opinion columnist for The New York Times. As he puts it, he’s written most days of most weeks for nearly 10 years.
Hundreds of thousands of people read his columns, and the Columbia Journalism Review, in a story by David Uberti published earlier this year, called him “one of the defining commentators on politics and race in the Trump era.”
Bouie is very active on Twitter (@jbouie), where his more than 266,000 followers get a regular dose of his thoughtful perspective on political and social issues national, international, and local (he lives in Charlottesville), mixed in with opinions about books, TV, and cereal (he recently opined that Cinnamon Toast Crunch Churros cereal is superior to regular Cinnamon Toast Crunch. They don’t get soggy right away, he says. “Because they have more surface area, they don’t take in milk as quickly”). Occasionally, he shares a photograph.
Bouie is a much more active photographer than his Twitter—or his Instagram profile, “New York Times columnist. Sometimes photographer”—would suggest. When Andrea Douglas, executive director of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, came across Bouie’s photography on Instagram, she was struck by his interest in landscape and curious about “the relationship of that visual language” in the larger context of his critical thinking and writing. Douglas sees Bouie’s photography as allowing his audience “a way to move into another sphere of engaging with his mind.”
When Douglas texted Bouie with an exhibition offer, Bouie agreed right away, though he wasn’t sure what photos he’d show. He’d been pursuing photography for years, but he hadn’t yet thought of it as something that could, or would, be seen beyond social media. “I don’t necessarily think of myself as an artist, in that way,” he says. “Even though I share lots of photos and every so often I think, ‘hey, that’s a strong image.’”
Being asked to exhibit his photography was “intimidating…which is a funny thing to say, because my day job is writing opinion pieces for The New York Times,” says Bouie. “A shocking number of people read these things. But for whatever reason, I can deal with that psychologically. Presenting my photographs to people? Much more intimidating.”
He says his writing, which focuses on “American history and the history of racism and class,” has “been described as a little opaque, and not entirely scrutable. And the photography is, in a real way, something that is much more personal.”
Of course it is. Photography shows where the artist has been, what he concerns himself with, what catches his eye, what he’s thinking about. It can say a lot about the person who stopped in his tracks, raised the camera to one eye, squinted through the viewfinder, and clicked the button. That’s not nothing.
A hotel in Boley, Oklahoma, one of the images from Bouie’s exhibit, “Simply: The Black Towns.”
Like most people, Bouie first encountered photography casually, using point-and-shoot and disposable cameras. He started pointing and shooting with more intention after graduating from UVA in 2009 with a degree in government and political and social thought, while working odd jobs at the Miller Center of Public Affairs. One of those odd jobs was taking photos at the center’s events, and Bouie was allowed to take the digital SLR camera and lens home to play with after-hours.
Not long after, Bouie started working as a journalist. He bought his own slick digital camera and used it, again, as most people would: to take snapshots on personal and work trips, “nothing very serious,” he says. And then his now mother-in-law gave him a film SLR camera.
Shooting film on an all-manual camera got Bouie thinking about the art of photography. Bouie says the “finiteness” of having, say, 36 exposures in a single roll of 35-millimeter film, made him contemplate what he wanted to photograph: If he had just 36 exposures, which 36 did he want to capture? And why? Photography was no longer just pointing and shooting.
Bouie was living in Washington, D.C., at the time, and he started the habit of taking his camera everywhere he went. He’d wander around downtown D.C. to practice framing shots, spotting interesting portrait subjects and getting comfortable asking complete strangers if he could take their picture. In 2017, he signed up for darkroom classes at Capitol Hill Arts Workshop to learn how to develop film and make his own prints.
His teacher, Katherine Akey, was immediately struck by his “passion for the medium. He constantly wanted to try new things, new ways of framing, new cameras, new darkroom applications. That kind of enthusiasm allows for a really fast pace of growth and exploration, like compost on a garden,” says Akey.
Soon, Bouie was spending eight hours a week in the darkroom, developing not just film but his eye.
“I still have a hard time saying that I have any subject,” says Bouie, who, at 32, is young, still new to the medium, and therefore in the process of defining his perspective as a photographer. But he has noticed that there are a few things that always catch his attention: geometries (particularly man-made geometries), symmetry, interplay of light and shadow. He shoots almost exclusively with normal lenses, “something that captures what the human eye sees or focuses on,” says Bouie.
He likes “old stuff.” Maybe that’s cliché, he says—lots of people like old stuff—but he totally gets why. Old stuff is undeniably compelling. For Bouie, the draw is two-fold: it’s the architecture itself and “trying to imagine what something would have looked like when it was loved. When people were doing the best they [could] to maintain it.” He likes thinking about how (and why) a building or an object that was once so lovingly created and maintained, has fallen into disrepair.
“This is a little morbid,” he adds, but there’s something fascinating about thinking about that cycle of care and neglect, of moving on, “as an inevitable thing. And there’s some beauty in that inevitability.”
He prefers to shoot in black and white, in part because he finds color film distracting, but also because, in his opinion, black and white film helps him better emphasize all those aspects that catch his eye: shape, shadow, story.
Bouie’s growing desire to create an intentional body of photographic works collided, “fortuitously,” he says, with his curiosity about the black towns and Douglas’ suggestion for an exhibition.
It was also a chance to combine, in a very concrete way, his journalistic interests with his photographic ones.
At first glance, these photographs might look and feel familiar: black and white images of buildings in various states of disrepair. But the viewer almost certainly has not seen these places, and has not heard the story Bouie’s photographs tell.
After the Civil War, tens of thousands of free blacks migrated to Kansas, which was known for being an anti-slavery state during the war, and “relatively friendlier to free blacks,” says Bouie. And when the Oklahoma Territory opened up in the 1890s (the federal government confiscated some 2 million acres of land from Native American tribes there in 1866), a new wave of black settlers moved there, too, fleeing the oppression and racial terror of the post-Reconstruction South.
The movement was led by two of the black men who had spearheaded the migration to Kansas—William Eagleton, a newspaperman, and Edward P. McCabe, a politician and businessman. Bouie purposefully said their names during his May 11 artist talk for the opening of “Simply: The Black Towns” at the JSAAHC, and read from one of the advertisements in Eagleton’s paper: “Give yourself a new start. Give yourselves and children new chances in a new land, where you will not be molested. Where you will be able to think and vote as you please.”
Bouie also read one of McCabe’s—“Here in Oklahoma, the negro can rest from mob law. He can be secure from every ill of Southern policies”—and a comment from an ordinary person, made in the 1890s: “We as a people believed that Africa is the place. But to get from under bondage, we are thinking Oklahoma, as this is our nearest place to safety.”
Black Southerners were willing to set out for a new land to attain some measure of freedom. What’s interesting, said Bouie during his artist talk, is “that this is the story of Western settlement of the United States in general.”
By 1900, black farmers owned and farmed many thousands of acres of land in the Midwest, and settlers founded more than 30 towns in Oklahoma alone, most of them scattered around the eastern part of the territory. They built homes, churches, schools, hotels, businesses, all with the hope that if they proved themselves hard workers who had attained an amount of political and economic freedom, white people would take notice and extend full rights to black people.
“Think about the people who made the decision to leave the South” and move west, says Douglas. Tens of thousands of people. “The quality and the quantity of that aspiration, it cannot be missed.”
The towns themselves were (and still are) very tidy and orderly, intentionally laid out on grids and full of “beautiful, stately buildings that were showcasing the ability of the people who came here to prosper and survive, and to make something out of what was really nothing,” says Bouie.
The prosperity wouldn’t last. In 1907, Oklahoma became a state, Jim Crow became law of the land, and the racism these people tried to escape in the South caught up to them. Poor weather conditions in the late 1900s meant crop failures for the farmers, and, because of Jim Crow, black farmers couldn’t get the government assistance they needed to weather the economic and literal storm. When the Great Depression hit in the late 1920s and ’30s, black business owners faced extraordinary hardship for similar reasons, and it was “game over for most of these places,” explains Bouie, as many people left the all-black towns for bigger cities like Tulsa and Oklahoma City, once again in search of a better life.
By the 1950s, just 20 of the black towns remained; today, 13. Boley is the largest of them, with an estimated 1,183 residents, and the others have a few hundred residents apiece, mostly older folks, says Bouie, who spoke with a few people in each town he visited: fire chiefs, pastors, people standing near him on the sidewalk.
Boley’s Country Store. Photo: Jamelle Bouie
Bouie sees his photographs of these towns as his contribution, however large or small, to public awareness of them, the people, their history. He sees it as nothing more.
“My conception of myself and what I’m doing [with these photos] is not nearly grand enough to think that I’m preserving this in any sense,” says Bouie, who is also working on an essay about his Oklahoma trip for the Times. He wants people to look at the photograph of Pearlie’s gravestone in Lima, Oklahoma, and see that she died rather young, that she was the wife of Edwards, and maybe think about who Pearlie was and what her life would have been like.
He wants people to look at the photo of Lima’s Rosenwald School, and understand that in the middle of Oklahoma, people once built, with their own hands, a beautiful school in which to educate their children, in a town that they themselves created with the hope of building a better, more prosperous life for themselves and their children. He wants people to think about what it means that the structures he’s photographed are still standing, and that people still live in these towns.
Bouie says that in this way, his photography is not necessarily unlike his writing: he approached this exhibition much as he approaches his New York Times opinion pieces, as works of “considered perspective.” In “Simply: The Black Towns,” he says he is “clearly an observer” offering his own perspective on these towns, a perspective that he says the viewer “should not necessarily take as the perspective on these places.”
Jamelle Bouie. Photo by Eze Amos
Photography teacher Akey still follows (via Instagram) Bouie’s lens, its view encompassing more than the black towns of Oklahoma, and including the built landscapes of Charlottesville, Richmond, Asheville, Seattle, and elsewhere. Akey says of Bouie’s overall body of work: “I think his gaze—and that of his camera—is often very loving and lingering while not giving in to the dark mysticism of Southern landscapes wholesale. I think Southern artists’ relationships to our heritage, land, and mythology is ripe for this kind of change, a change that is evident in Jamelle’s work.”
In hanging the exhibition, Douglas and Bouie chose to present the photographs unframed. Together, the pictures “tell a really meaningful and poignant story,” says Douglas, one that should not be glazed over by frame glass, or anything else. The photos present “a discourse about African American space, a discourse about the past, and what remains,” she adds. “You want that feel to be unobstructed.”
In tracking down this history, these places, says Douglas, Bouie “causes us to understand what it means to reclaim an African American story, the importance and the implication of that work in this moment,” in creating for everyone “a more complete narrative.” And, she adds, this is just the beginning for him as a photographer.
Bouie chose to tell a simplified version of the history on the exhibition tag that introduces the show, and has labeled each photograph with a concise marker of what we’re looking at: “A now-defunct general store for Boley,” or “A resident of Tatums rides his bike down one of the pathways leading to the highway.”
He gives bits and pieces of the history, perhaps so that the viewer can practice seeing what was, and what is. And maybe in that process, they too will get something stuck in their craw.
The exhibition is a different way of presenting the themes Bouie explores in his writing, Douglas says, “this sort of interesting, nuanced, American narrative. And [he is] trying to bring ideas to the [forefront], and a perspective that is not mainstream. And so these places are not mainstream places. They’re off the beaten path. And in some ways, their survival is heroic.”
The story Bouie tells with “Simply: The Black Towns,” with his careful attention to those landscapes, is a “testament to the hope people brought to this, and the story of how these places declined, which is an economic story,” he says. “But also, it’s a story about racism, which says something about the difficulty of trying to build a stable life for oneself in a racist society when you ultimately cannot really escape that.”
That is a story, he says, that’s “extremely American.”
Photojournalist Jodi Cobb is one of those rare people who walks toward danger. And when she meets it, she usually introduces herself.
“I’ve never disguised myself or misrepresented what I was doing,” says Cobb. “I even introduced myself as a National Geographic photographer to the most notorious human trafficker in Bosnia.”
Cobb has spent the better part of four decades as the only female staff field photographer at National Geographic-—the only one in its 130-year history, actually. But she says gender was never top of mind for her. “I was always really surprised when the first thing out of people’s mouths was the woman angle. It’s like asking people what it’s like to breathe.” Still, she admits, “You feel like you need to hold up all of womankind, and it’s an extra thing that men don’t have to think about all that much.”
Cobb grew up in Iran, where her father worked for Texaco, and she had been to 15 countries by the time she entered high school in the U.S. The global exposure gave her a head start in finding her passion. “I spent my life explaining the world to people, then I realized that was what journalism was,” says Cobb.
On Thursday, she hosts a live retrospective about her life behind the camera, including her wide-ranging exposé on human trafficking, her book on geisha culture from the inside, and a look at Venice celebrating Carnival against a backdrop of looming environmental peril.
Geisha Kyoto, Japan
“I did a book on the geisha of Japan and spent six months over a three-year period just immersed in their world, going to the geisha districts every day.
“You don’t realize how hard that [image] was to get. It was a moment in the geisha house that shows how inside I was at that moment. No one had ever photographed behind the scenes in the geisha world, with candid photographs, so that was a real accomplishment.
“The smoking was common and no one wanted to be photographed smoking. It makes her real to me. Instead of this sort of icon that geisha are. It makes her a real person.”
Brick kiln workersAgra, India
“This is from the story on 21st-century slaves. I photographed in 11 countries over a yearlong period, trying to put together as many kinds of human trafficking [images] as I could find.
“National Geographic was going out on a limb to do that story—it was my idea—and it was so outside of what they usually did. It was before there was so much consciousness in this country about human trafficking. We knew bits of it–child labor existed and about sex trafficking—but no one had put it all together into a look at how pervasive it was.
“The brick kiln workers are often held in debt bondage for generations. The owners get workers by lending them money for an emergency, then charge outrageous interest rates. The debt can never be repaid and gets passed on for generations. That story broke my heart every single day.”
CarnivalVenice, Italy
“I did a story on Venice that was about whether Venice was going to survive floods and the rising sea levels. That was a party during Carnival. People in their incredible costumes come from all over the world. We are used to seeing all of these setup images taken on the piazzas and things. But I was able to get into the private parties…and that’s where I’ve always wanted to be in my career—on the inside and behind the scenes. That sums up my body of work: being inside these hidden worlds and secret places that outsiders wouldn’t see.”
National Geographic Live will be at The Paramount Theater February 28.
In images like this one, photographer Richard Needham explores judgement, fear, fashion, and analog film in his show at Studio IX. Photo courtesy of the artist
Before meeting on the patio outside Kardinal Hall, Richard Needham worried about his outfit. He thought his white jeans might be too feminine, or that his “There is no planet B” T-shirt and rope necklace with a C-shaped bear claw tied to the end might be too much of a conversation-starter.
“It’s a double-edge sword. People tell me, ‘Well, a bear is your spirit animal.’ But this real bear died,” Needham explains. “A reindeer herder in Mongolia gave it to me. It’s like a talisman. I feel some sort of power when I wear it against my chest.”
Needham’s work as a documentary filmmaker and photographer has taken him around the world—from photographing Tsaatan nomadic reindeer herders in northern Mongolia, and teams of polo players who compete on elephants in Moo Baan Chang, Thailand, to filming 60 professional dancers with artist Dara Friedman on the streets of Miami. He credits Friedman and her focus on fashion, the human body, and street art as a large influence on “My Fellow Man: Don’ttalk to strangers,” his upcoming show at Studio IX.
“Everyone is a photographer now. You just pick up your phone,” says Needham. “It’s not mindful. The show is a meditation.”
In his latest images, Needham walked around densely populated areas—usually the Downtown Mall, though some images are from trips to Seattle and Walla Walla, Washington. He approached individuals who he found himself judging at first glance, whether positively or negatively, and asked if he could take their photograph. If they consented, and Needham found that most people did, he would photograph and record an audio interview with them. Needham’s creativity is influenced by his social anxiety about approaching strangers, his self-judgment that he “isn’t particularly good at words,” and his worry about the speed at which our world moves.
Photo courtesy of artist
The questions in each interview varied depending on the individual, ranging from “What’s troubling you right now?” to “What message would you like to share with people looking at your photograph?” Needham will display text from interviewees next to their portraits in the show, leaving the dialogue largely unedited.
The photographer, who has an MFA in film production from the University of Miami’s School of Communication, appreciates the ability to replicate the beauty of natural speech and cadence of human dialogue.
“My Fellow Man: Don’ttalk to strangers”
Opens September 7 at Studio IX
“I was surprised that politics wasn’t as much on the forefront,” Needham says of his conversations. “The current climate is there, but people appreciated the attempt to connect when it seems like social media is all there is. In a single sentence, everyone’s battling for dominance on social media. This [show] is the antithesis of that. It’s analog.”
It’s about connecting with people and humanizing them, and taking a moment to slow everything down—which is exactly what Needham had to do while using a Pentax 67 camera. It’s a large, 40-year old medium-format film camera that weighs five pounds. Needham says the camera takes a long time to focus, and makes a loud sound he describes as a “ka-lunk” when the shutter opens and closes.
Artists don’t traditionally use the Pentax 67 camera to capture street images, Needham says, though it is used often to take full-body fashion shots in a studio.
And Needham’s images resonate with fashion or photo journalism spreads that viewers might see in Vogue or Vanity Fair with subjects confronting the camera with confidence, comfortable in their own skin. As viewers stare back at them, Needham’s anxiety, discomfort, and fear become tangible. Needham says that in a certain sense, “these are all portraits of me.”
Photo courtesy of the artist
“With digital cameras, you’re always looking at the past. With this camera, I had no idea what I got. It’s very forward,” says Needham, who usually takes one or two shots of each of his subjects. “I like that way of looking at it. It’s frightening and scary. Fear is the whole project.”
One of Needham’s most forward moments involved Valerian and Elliott, the two individuals in the show’s title image. In the image, Valerian wears a floral maxi dress, a straw sun hat, white gloves flecked with red, and a beard past vis collarbone. Elliott wears a black graphic T-shirt, gray slacks, and sunglasses—both are smiling.
“I saw them walking down the street while I was driving, so I pulled around the block, parked, and had to run to catch up to them,” Needham remembers.
Despite his anxieties, Needham is moved by the experience of talking to his subjects, and he encourages others to do the same thing. “Go first. Say hello first. Be the one to say hello when you’re in an awkward situation.”
Lorretta Goins was the first portrait Sarah Cramer Shields took after the events of August 11 and 12, launching the project “This Is Charlottesville,” on display at VMDO Architects now through the end of 2017, and on Instagram at @thisischarlottesville. Photo by Sarah Cramer Shields
As the events of August 11 and 12 unfolded across Charlottesville, photojournalist Sarah Cramer Shields watched it happen on the news.
“I was putting two small children down for naps when it happened,” Shields says in an interview with C-VILLE. “I wanted to be on the front lines telling the stories of what was happening, but I knew that wasn’t the right place for me.”
Watching live as national and local outlets broadcast the violence, she saw “a ton of Nazi symbols, people’s heads being bashed in, people being killed. I remember thinking, That’s not our town.”
Shields wanted to show the world a different side of Charlottesville: one that embraced and celebrated its residents, people who come from all places and all walks of life.
Determined to contribute somehow, she asked herself what the community might need as it began to heal.
“I think people need to connect,” she says. “I think change only happens when we step outside our comfort zone and see and talk to people who are outside our daily paths.”
Shields, who began taking photos in middle school and turned pro after graduating from UVA in 2005, says she seeks out the human connection in all her work, whether she does it for weddings, editorials or other projects. She decided to put her skills to work documenting the people of her town and launched an ongoing project called “This Is Charlottesville.”
Just a few days after August 12, she began walking through town one day a week and asking strangers if she could photograph them. Ninety-eight percent of the time people said yes.
“For some reason, I make people really comfortable. They just pour their souls out to me,” she says. “I’ve been surprised by how much people really want to talk about things, and there really isn’t a platform to do so.”
When Shields takes photos, she asks everyone the same five questions. (She also asks her subjects to nominate up to three people to be featured in the project; her goal is to create one new profile per day.) Then she goes home, transcribes the interview and posts the highlights on Instagram and Facebook. “This is Charlottesville” has 85 profiles and counting. The response, she says, has been amazing.
“People love to hear other people’s walks of life,” she says. “You’ve got people in Hogwaller reading about the dean of the UVA medical school. People on the Downtown Mall seeing the stories of people in Friendship Court.”
Certain connections stand out, she says. Like “the Afghan father who moved here with four kids. He was looking for work but has an incredible skillset, which came across in his profile. I got emails from people who said, ‘What great skills he has, I’ll keep him in mind for jobs.’
“There’s a girl in Friendship Court who is a die hard Cavaliers fan. She’s never missed a game, but she’s never been to a game, either. Within an hour of me posting her story, 20 different people reached out to say, ‘Here, she can have my tickets to this weekend’s game.’”
Shields feels “blown away” by these experiences, which hint at the potential of her project to become an even bigger bridge within the community.
“I think we have a lot of issues in our town, our city and our state that we need to talk about,” she says. “I know this [project] is not a cure by any means.”
But as a personal response to local events, “This Is Charlottesville” allows Shields to highlight the connection she experiences every day.
Whenever she photographs someone, she waits for the moment when her subject lowers his guard. (It usually happens while people talk about something they love.)
The instant her subjects open up, she says, it reveals who they really are.
“I look for honest warmth and openness. A pure, real moment where someone is lost in themselves and they trust me to take their photo.”
That authenticity is the potent stuff that allows strangers to feel close, no matter how different their lives look on paper—or in pixels.
“I’m not some heroic problem solver,” Shields says, “but I see the main issue as the fact that we are not connecting. I don’t know how change is going to happen unless we start listening and seeing how other people live their lives.”
Aaron Farrington’s portrait studio will open at McGuffey Art Center on November 29. Portraits from his “People of Charlottesville” series (like “Evan” above and “Rodney” below) will be on display during the Holiday Group Show at McGuffey in December. Courtesy of the artist
Aaron Farrington fell for photography in high school after his grandfather died. “My mom inherited his camera, so I inherited her camera and started taking pictures,” he says. Farrington became interested in making movies, too, and enrolled in a New York film school. But thanks to the expense, he dropped out and wrote a novel because, he says with his wry humor, “I wanted to do something cheaper.”
Farrington made his way to Charlottesville in 1997. “Moving here was great because it was cheap back then and it was easy to leave and come back,” he says. Inspiration came into focus on a road trip to Alaska and Los Angeles. Taking photographs along the way, Farrington returned with a lot of film to develop. “I learned how to do that and I was hooked,” he says.
Two years ago, he began shooting wet-plate photographs with a 1910 camera he found on eBay. Actually, he says, “The camera found me.” Wet-plate photography was invented by Frederick Scott Archer in 1851. It predates film and instead captures photographs on glass or aluminum plates. First Farrington sensitizes the plate by coating it with a mixture of a soluble iodide and collodion (cellulose nitrate) solution. Then he shoots the photo, which requires removing and replacing the lens cap because the camera doesn’t have a shutter. Using the portable dark box he built, he has to develop the photo before the plate dries. All of this happens in the span of 10 to 15 minutes. “It’s like a Polaroid,” he says. “Instant gratification…sometimes no gratification at all. It can be tricky.”
“Rodney.” Courtesy of the artist
Before purchasing the camera online, Farrington spent a summer shooting digital photos on the road with the Dave Matthews Band. He’d return to Charlottesville after two to three shows with about 5,000 photos to edit, but he found himself unhappy with this prospect.
“I didn’t get interested in photography because I wanted to sit in front of a computer,” he says. He recalls Nick Nichols (National Geographic photographer and founder of the LOOK3 Festival of the Photograph) saying to him when digital photography was beginning to take off, “The world is round in digital.” But Farrington has resisted this idea. “Creative constraints, I think, are good,” he says. “They can help focus us.” Now that photo editing software can give you any effect you want, he says, “It makes it seem maybe just a little less magic, and less a feeling of accomplishment.”
Farrington, who is opening a wet plate portrait studio at McGuffey Art Center this month, says the process appeals to him for a couple other reasons. One, he’s shy and it gives him something to talk about with his portrait subjects. “And the process is really fun to watch,” he says. “After you develop the plate in the dark box and bring it out into the light, it’s kind of a strange, milky negative image. You pour the fixer on it and slowly it turns into a positive and it just looks like magic and alchemy.” Another thing that makes it unique, Farrington says, is “it’s only sensitive to the blue end of the light spectrum. It means that people with really blue eyes end up with light or almost white-looking eyes.”
In an ongoing project, Farrington is documenting oral histories, shooting video portraits and making wet-plate portraits of Charlottesville residents in a series called “People of Charlottesville.” He recently exhibited some of the portraits at The Bridge, a selection of which will be on display during McGuffey’s Holiday Group Show in December. The series was born out of Farrington’s desire to record people’s stories in his own neighborhood. But his concept for the series expanded after the election, and again after August 12. “I wanted to celebrate who we are and what we are, for better or for worse,” he says.
Robert Polidori’s aim is to capture in a photograph of rooms with many coats of different colored flaking paint the quality of a painting. Courtesy of the artist
According to Neal Guma, what unites the four photographers in his current show is an approach to photography that is painterly. While Ljubodrag Andric and Robert Polidori often seek out subjects that can look like paintings and play with our perception of them, Markus Brunetti and John Chiara use photography as a painter might paint, manipulating the medium to create effects.
Andric’s photograph “China #8” features a wall of gorgeous, subtly modulated hues. Here washes of mauve, blue and rust are punctuated with touches of scarlet and white. The work is reminiscent of a Color Field painting, where the focus is on the expressive and visual qualities of paint on a flat surface. One of its major proponents, Jules Olitski famously said his work should ideally look like “nothing but some colors sprayed into the air and staying there.”
Andric’s is in some ways a disorienting image. At first, one isn’t sure if it’s a painting or a photograph, or whether it’s flat or has depth. As one approaches, details such as the metal bar that bisects the image, and the areas where the paint has flaked off, emerge. “This painterly and hyper-realism works in reverse in painting,” says Guma. “For instance, when you think of a painter like Velázquez, when you’re far away, his paintings are incredibly real, but when you get up to them they fall apart and you see the individual strokes, the architecture, if you will, which from a distance coalesces to form something of a trompe l’oeil likeness. In this photograph, and also in the Brunetti, the opposite is true. The hyper-reality becomes more intense the closer you get.”
Like Andric, Polidori’s “Hotel Petra No. 7” is an image of decrepitude elevated to the realm of the sublime. “Polidori has found a way to do something very similar to Andric.”
Polidori’s aim is to capture in a photograph of rooms with many coats of different colored flaking paint the quality of a painting. “Hotel Petra” has the balance and integrity of a fully realized abstract painting with color, composition and gesture striking just the right note.
He also wants to capture the history of the place and its decay over the years. The once elegant Hotel Petra is a surrogate for the vibrant and cosmopolitan pre-civil war Beirut. This union of present and past within one image is very much a Polidori hallmark. It’s no surprise he is drawn to places like Havana, Chernobyl and post-Katrina New Orleans—storied places where the images are charged with history, catastrophe or both.
The Andric and Polidori photographs are of man-made subjects, yet Polidori’s stalactite shreds of paint and Andric’s mineral-like wall have the timbre and beauty of natural phenomena.
Markus Brunetti’s “Amiens, Cathédrale Notre-Dame” is on view as part of a photography group show that includes Ljubodrag Andric, John Chiara and Robert Polidori at Neal Guma Fine Art. Courtesy of the artist
Brunetti appeared on the art scene to immediate acclaim in 2015 with his series of Western European sacred structures made over the course of 10 years. Brunetti photographed each building in multiple sections, which his partner, Betty Schoener, subsequently assembled to form a composite image. The enormity of the endeavor is clear when you consider that the photographs are composed of thousands of individual frames that all have to be taken under the same conditions of light so that when merged together to create the final image it appears seamless. This laborious process ensures an equal field of focus across the entire surface, giving these photographs extraordinary clarity. Looking at them, it’s as if we’re seeing these iconic buildings for the very first time and we get a sense of the shock and awe they would inspire when initially constructed.
There’s a curious play between the flatness and the detail and, as Guma says, “Brunetti renders these almost as architectural drawings. It’s just the facade. You get some of the nearby buildings, but the town is mostly gone.” In “Amiens, Cathédrale Notre-Dame,” one can enjoy both the remarkable visual effect Brunetti achieves and also appreciate these extraordinary structures and the way they would dominate a town.
Chiara takes on the Flatiron Building as his subject in “West 23rd Street at Broadway, Variation 3,” and tells us something new about the building and photography itself. Taken with a 30″x50″ pinhole camera mounted on the back of a Ford F150 pickup, Chiara shoots directly onto color photographic paper that records in negative, with the shadows and light inverted.
Guma’s version is one of three variations, the lightest and most colorful with its highly keyed yellow and touches of emerald and red. Nevertheless, there’s something rather ghostly about the photograph having to do with the yellow that seems to shroud the image in a weird sulfurous light, and the isolation that recalls Edward Hopper.
The dramatic angle makes the building resemble the prow of a ship, accentuating the forward thrust, and that the early 20th-century building’s distinctive shape was meant to convey movement, speed, modernity.
“Chiara wants to have the process part of the image, the flash of over exposure at the bottom, the curious black and red gestural shapes in the background, the tape marks he leaves behind, the uneven way he cuts the image out. This is a very painterly concept,” says Guma.
The four artists on view have distinct approaches and styles. Each produces works that are visually satisfying enough to appeal without any further knowledge, but the artists’ working process and attitude toward their oeuvres adds a whole other level of appreciation that enhances the viewers’ experience and makes them want to see more.
Photographer Matt Eich’s “Duct Tape” is an example of how he approaches his work, offering lessons in empathy and our responsibility to each other. Courtesy the artist
Ten years before they were blamed and credited with helping to elect Donald Trump the 45th president of the United States, the white working class in post-industrial southeastern Ohio was documented by Matt Eich. A 19-year-old student of photojournalism at Ohio University at the time, Eich, now a Charlottesville resident, had grown tired of what he calls the college bubble. “I wanted to see what lives were like outside of that bubble. I found family, love, tenderness, tenacity, all kinds of other things,” he says. And this October, just before the election, he published a collection called Carry Me Ohio. The first edition was released worldwide in a print run of 600 and sold out in a month.
Eich’s explorations in “making pictures” began at age 10. “My grandmother was dying of Alzheimer’s and my grandfather took me on a road trip and handed me a camera,” he says. His work largely consists of moving portraits of people in everyday life. In high school he was exposed to the war photography of James Nachtwey and came to an important decision as a budding artist who also dabbled in music: “Photography has the greater potential for social good, which drove me to photojournalism,” says Eich. It was this drive that compelled him to overcome his shyness.
While soft-spoken, he conveys an earnest desire to capture people as they are, without pushing an agenda. He describes sitting quietly in a trailer in Ohio, chain-smoking and waiting to earn the trust of people who arrived to pick up illegally acquired OxyContin. Because while he did find tenderness and tenacity in these small communities, he also found poverty and addiction. “It’s hard to address it without falling into tropes,” he says. And even now, after 10 years of immersing himself, he says, “I still haven’t addressed it yet to the degree I want to, given how it’s taken over the towns.”
One photo called “Duct Tape” shows a young boy and small dog looking out a duct-taped window. The boy looks as though he’s crouched against the cold, and a bare tree is reflected in the window. Eich explains that the boy is in his family’s old trailer watching as the adults prepare to bring a new trailer onto their property in Chauncey, Ohio.
Another photo, “Elvis the Zebra,” adds some whimsy and strangeness to the collection as a zebra prances in the snow, seemingly in someone’s backyard. Eich explains that he took the photo at The Wilds, a research and conservation facility in Columbus located on 10,000 acres of reclaimed strip mine. “I’m interested in photos with a sense of mystery or ambiguity, which counteracts my photojournalism upbringing where photos are supposed to deliver information,” says Eich.
But he is also very committed to the role of photojournalism. On assignment he has photographed people with whom he is “completely and utterly morally opposed.” But, he says, “The role of journalism is to put light on marginalized communities, whether they’re marginalized with good reason or without.” He uses the medium, he says, “not for further division and polarization, but to show what we share in common, things we all need as human beings and citizens of the world.” It requires compartmentalization, he says, because the alternative is “if no one’s paying attention, things can grow in the dark and spread beyond our understanding.”
Yet the work he does not only requires his attention, but his empathy as well. “While I may not agree with people personally or politically,” he says, “I have to feel empathy for them or I can’t do the work. I have to interact with them as fellow citizens, human beings.” Speaking specifically of the subjects in Carry Me Ohio, Eich says, “Their choices are made out of decades of being forgotten. …We were taught in grad school ‘listen to your work.’ I’ve been trying to put a finger on the pulse of what’s happening in America. The growing discontent. It didn’t have a name for a long time. But now it does.”
And it is evident in the way he describes the collections scheduled to follow Carry Me Ohio, that his approach to his work continues to be careful and conscientious. The next volume, Sin and Salvation in Baptist Town, is due out in 2018 and is based on a community in Mississippi where there is a glaring disparity between the living conditions of the African-American and white communities. “I had a lot of conversations with people about how they’re used to being portrayed, and how they’d like to be portrayed,” he says. “The pictures need to strike a balance between the way they see themselves and the way I see them. I don’t want to create propaganda but I also don’t want to project my own outsider perceptions on them either.”
