The brand new Serenbe Photography Center is opening its doors this Saturday, March 13th, 5-8pm! Their calendar (pdf link) is already full of great programming, and it’s with great excitement that we welcome a new, robust photography organization to Greater Atlanta!

Swan Coach House Gallery is having a show called “Abstracted Nature” opening this Thursday, March 11th, at 6pm. A combination of painters and photographers will be exhibited, curated by Marianne Lambert. Photographers include Marc Fagan, Kathryn Kolb, Billy Newman, and Marilyn Suriani.

Please check out the Swan Coach House press release for more information.

© Kathryn Kolb, “American Chesnut”

“THREE VOICES

Photographs by John Bohannon, Pam Moxley, and Ansley West
March 13 – May 1, 2010

Opening Reception: Saturday, March 13, 7-10pm

Snapdragon Photography/Jennifer Schwartz Gallery, Atlanta, GA

Snapdragon Photography/Jennifer Schwartz Gallery is pleased to announce our latest exhibition, “Three Voices”, featuring photography by Atlanta artists John Bohannon, Pam Moxley, and Ansley West. The conceptual photographs in this exhibit depict intimate scenes and objects which capture each photographer’s unique voice. A party for the artists will be held on Saturday March 13th, from 7 to 10pm, and the exhibition will continue through Saturday May 1st.

John Bohannon creates images which capture his encounters with places and things that he feels have emotive potential. The resulting photographs are a collection of moments and memories – a personal experience, both for the photographer and viewer. Bohannon has been included in dozens of juried exhibitions throughout the Southeast, and his work has been featured in Shots magazine and the Florida Review. In 2009, he was one of twelve photographers chosen to participate in Gifted, Atlanta Celebrates Photography’s Public Art Project.

Self-taught artist Pam Moxley is the co-owner of Original Art Finders and Curator of Grace Gallery in Marietta, Georgia. She has been featured in numerous solo and juried exhibitions and her work is included in collections throughout the United States, including the Southeast Museum of Photography, the City of Atlanta Collection, and the Atlanta Photography Group’s Collector’s Portfolio. Moxley’s mixed-media images are simple in composition, yet complex in theme. Her work often incorporates child-like elements, giving them a nostalgic and maternal feel. When she is finished with each photographic construction, she utilizes several other media, adding layers of both texture and meaning.

Ansley West’s photographic compositions interpret narratives both real and imagined. She often places herself into the photographs, in order to recontextualize these stories. Her work sometimes portrays social issues about which she is passionate. The images selected for this show come from two bodies of work: “Fences” addresses the physical and psychological hurdles we face and how we move past them, while “Landscapes” seeks to show that human connection to the earth can be a symbiotic rather than a parasitic relationship. As well as being included in many group exhibitions across the US and featured in three solo shows, West’s work is included in many private and museum collections, including the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia. She has recently returned from Uganda, where she shot a documentary film called Mother of a Nation, about women living with HIV and their connection to agriculture.

“We are very excited to announce an upcoming exhibition of photographs by David Johnson (March 11th- May 1st, 2010). At age 20, in 1946, David was the first African American student to study at the California School of Fine Arts ( currently San Francisco Art Institute). While studying directly under Ansel Adams, Johnson began to photograph his neighborhood, San Francisco’s Fillmore District. In his first Atlanta exhibition, David will showcase his portraits and documentation of the Fillmore as a vibrant center of jazz music from 1946-1963. Please mark your calendar for a reception with the artist on March 25th from 6-9p. And, stay tuned for announcement of the date for a talk with David Johnson and curator of the exhibition Edward Spriggs.

For more information about David Johnson’s photography, check out the following articles:
http://www.npr.org/
http://www.apogeephoto.com/

We’re really looking forward to tmw night’s edition of Greenhouse, featuring Matt Haffner, Katherine Taylor, and Jason Francisco, at 7pm at Emory. Here’s a map to the Visual Arts building, and more info about Greenhouse. RSVP on Facebook!

Chuck Hemard’s “Shelter” is on view at Opal Gallery, with a meet-the-artist event on Thursday night at 6:30pm.

“The notion of “shelter” implies sanctuary and protection from danger. Often, sources of this essential human need range from stable ones to more temporary or those derived from more transient means. Contemporary American culture is both fickle and insistent. At times, our insatiable hunger for progress can lead to a greed-driven pursuit of sometimes-empty dreams. Often progress involves struggle. These five images evoke curiosity in the everyday - people, their objects, and actions within the landscape - in order to encourage thoughtful consideration and awareness of our way of life and the potential for significance within the fleeting.

Utilizing the camera’s ability to transform life’s over-common and over-looked irrelevancies, I make (post documentary) work that is at best keen observation begging for consideration as opposed to a call to action. I enjoy photography’s sincere though ambiguous nature that allows for a range of potential meanings to be available, and, how editing informs likely interpretations.”

LoveNests will showcase the lives of a colorful collective of Atlanta locals through design. The exhibition is a collaborative effort between Portfolio Center photography and Georgia Tech industrial design students. Through interviews, storytelling, and photography, the curators will delve into the personalities and histories of popular Atlantans and discover what objects define, inspire, and capture the essence of their individuality. Once this process is complete, the photographers and designers will work together to translate and engineer each person’s symbolic spirit, so to speak, into a three-dimensional representation. Structural, abstract, graphic and diverse, each Atlantan is tangibly personified at MODA through designed environments. LoveNests serves as an engaging, illustrative biography of our Atlanta favorites.

The fascinating Atlantans featured in the exhibit, in no particular order, are:

Danger Woman
Kevin Gillespie
Andrew Young
Aidan Hornaday
Daniel Holzberger
Farmer D
Ballethnic
Prophet Love
Rafael Ibarra
Baton Bob

The reception will be held Friday, Feb. 26th from 6:30-9:30pm.”

“I want with this work to start the process of finding my identity and discovering the best ways to express it through my photographs. I want with my images to create more attention and curiosity to our culture and how we relate to each other, not only between US and Puerto Rico but between all the different races and Americans with different backgrounds that live here. I want to contribute to make “the other’s art”, just art.”

Here’s a pdf with info about the new exhibition at Trees Atlanta from David Knox and Kathryn Kolb.

We’re excited about the launch of the new Serenbe Photography Center, just south of Atlanta. They have an extensive program of workshops on the calendar, and their traditional (and digital) darkroom offers many options for local photographers. Fantastic!

© Tari Beroszi

“Tari Beroszi’s large-scale abstract photography panels will open Thursday, February 4 from 6-9pm at Snapdragon Photography/Jennifer Schwartz Gallery in TULA Arts Center. Beroszi’s work, “Seeing Sound”, is an exploration of music and image. She uses photography as a tool to translate the language of music into abstract images, resulting in a poetic and conceptual representation of a non-visual language. Her photographs are the abstract equivalents of what she feels and what she sees from within when listening to music.

Dawoud Bey: Class Pictures
Emory Visual Arts Gallery
February 4-March 4, 2010

Opening reception: Thursday, February 4, 5-8 pm
Featuring…
~Food and Libations
~At 5:30 pm, a special presentation by the Transforming Community Project introducing Dawoud Bey’s Spring 2010 Artist Residency at Emory University*
~At 7:00 pm, an artist’s talk by Dawoud Bey

In images made in public and private high schools across the United States, renowned portraitist Dawoud Bey offers a cross section of a generation, which is also a microcosm of the American experience as it finds expression in and as adolescent preoccupations, dreams and intensities. Accompanying each photograph is a statement by its subject, interrogating, challenging and elaborating the image—effectively performing the first in a chain of readings (including our own) that catalyze the portrait’s meanings. The subjects’ receptivity to themselves—following Bey’s own sympathetic receptivity to them—solicits, directs and finally compels our own humanistic response.

*Class Pictures is presented in conjunction with a month-long residency by Dawoud Bey, during which he will work with the Transforming Community Project (TCP) to photograph students, faculty and staff, gather their written and oral testimonies, and conduct workshops that explore the racial history and diversity of Emory University. This residency celebrates TCP’s extraordinary five-year service to the Emory community (2005-2010) and seeks to contribute to their enduring legacy on campus.

Class Pictures and Dawoud Bey’s residency are sponsored by Emory University’s Transforming Community Project, the Hightower Fund, and the Emory College Center for Creativity & Arts.

A quick reminder that the annual auction to benefit Art Papers is on February 6th, and tickets are on sale now. Plenty of photographers have pieces in the auction; here’s a list of participating artists.

Corinne Adams, Lisa Alembik, Todd Alexander, Tristan al-Haddad, Sterling Allen, Alvaro Alvillar, Larry Jens Anderson, Anita Arliss, Linda Armstrong, Meg Aubrey, Philip Auslander, Mali Azima, Peter Bahouth, Beverly Baker, Nancy Baker, Conrad Bakker, Corey Barksdale, Michael Barringer, Balam Bartolomé, Avantika Bawa, Anne Beidler, Laura Bell, Robin Bernat, Daniel Biddy, Joe Biel, Janet Biggs, Matt Blackwell, BORN, Elaine Bradford, Mark Bradley-Shoup, Laura Bruce, Tania Bruguera, Caroline Bullock, Lucinda Bunnen, Luca Buvoli, Stefani Byrd, Danny Campbell, Dennis Campay, Lilly Cannon, Philip Carpenter, Jennifer Cawley, Mel Chin, Susan Cipcic, Charles Clary, Clayton Colvin, Monica Cook, Ginny Cook, Kate Crosby, Jerry Cullum, Dorit Cypis, Cathy Daley, Patrick DeGuira, Rebecca DesMarais, Brian Dettmer, Terri Dilling, Craig Dongoski, Stephanie Dowda, Craig Drennen, Ruth Dusseault, Wes Eastin, Sarah Emerson, Jody Fausett, Malaika Favorite, Laura Faw, Barrett Feldman, Julia Fenton, Tom Ferguson, Brendan Fernandes, Rosemarie Fiore, Robert Fischer, Margaret Fletcher, Nancy Floyd, Taj Forer, Angela Fraleigh, Jason Francisco, Scott French, Anna Christina Frischknecht, Randy Gachet, Angus Galloway, Meta Gary, Eula Ginsburg, Rory Golden, Ben Goldman, Charles Goldman, Julie Green, Joshua Dudley Greer, Kojo Griffin, Hadley+Maxwell, Matt Haffner, Paul Hagedorn, Iris Häussler, Rachel Hayes, Jodi Hays, Sally Heller, Tony Hernandez, Julia Hill, Hope Hilton, Sarah Hobbs, Sun Hong, Ridley Howard, Scott Ingram, Doug Ischar, J. Ivcevich, Jennifer J.L. Jones, Glenn Kaino, Mark Karelson, Marcus Kenney, Harrison Keys, Lily Kuonen, Alexander Kvares, Kristofer Laméy, Judy Morris Lampert, Caroline Lathan-Stiefel, Jack Lawing, Scott Lawrence, Mark Leibert, Kalup Linzy, Matt Lively, Steve Locke, George Long, Pam Longobardi, Sharon Louden, Oliver Lutz, Jennifer Mack, Kelly Mark, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Victoria Martin-Gilly, David McConnell, Conor McGrady, Michael Jones McKean, Kelly McKernan, Michi Meko, Corrina Sephora Mensoff, Donna Mintz, Linda Mitchell, Katherine Mitchell, Traci Molloy, Julian Montague, Dana Montlack, Jiha Moon, Andy Moon Wilson, Gean Moreno, Rebecca Morris, Laura Mosquera, Carter Mull, Michael David Murphy, Prema Murthy, Patrick Nagatani, Warren Neidich, Ilona Niemi, Laura Noel, Brian Novatny, Karyn Olivier, Robyn O’Neil, Ernesto Oroza, Adrienne Outlaw, Susan Harbage Page, Carolanna Parlato, Vesna Pavlovic, Daniel Pelt, Joe Peragine, Sigrira Perret-Gentil, David E. Peterson, Sandra-Lee Phipps, Plastic Aztecs, Amy Pleasant, Greg Pond, Carl Pope, Sheila Pree Bright, Manny Prieres, Julie Püttgen, Sofya Radelet, Daniel Raedeke, Ray Rapp, Barbara Rehg, Allison Rentz, Jeff Rich, Matthew Rich, Shaun Richards, Shana Robbins, Rana Rochat, Ben Roosevelt, Jack Dingo Ryan, Jon Sasaki, Chris Scarborough, Mario Schambon, BE Schellinger, Michele Schuff, Michael Scoggins, Richard Sexton, Felice Sharp, Robert Sherer, Noah Simblist, Melissa Sims, Julie Sims, Deanna Sirlin, Brett Smith, Caroline Smith, Pat Snow, Joe Sola, Jered Sprecher, Micah Stansell, Whitney Stansell, Stephanie Sutton, Katherine Taylor, Tommy Taylor, Kelly Teasley, Dayna Thacker, John Tindel, Jeanie Tomanek, Tonel, Murphy Townsend, Gregor Turk, Lisa Tuttle, Yi-Hsin Tzeng, Yukari Umekawa, Waldo Vinces, Tracy Wagner, Robert Walden, Audrey Ward, Adam Waterson, James Way, Carrie Mae Weems, Heather Weese, Mark Wentzel, Angela West, Christian Bradley West, Holly White, Alex P. White, Martha Whittington, Pandra Williams, Teri Williams, Gwen Wong, Whitney Wood, Xenia Zed, Monica Zeringue and Marina Zurkow.