Juried exhibition and calls for entry in Georgia

“SlowExposures,” a juried exhibition taking place in the gallery of the same name in Concord, Georgia, will celebrate the diversity and culture of the rural South. Georgia, with its prolifigation of green trees, spanish moss, and strange, often ebullient, sometimes tragic stories, is still an epicenter of "Southerness," at least in the minds of outsiders like me. The competition is open to all photographers nationwide, but the images must have been taken in the State of Georgia. The deadline is June 30, 2007, and the exhibition will run September 21-30, 2007.

From the SlowExposures website:

Jurors Birney Imes and Sylvia Plachy will choose a number of images from the scores of images that are traditionally submitted each year to present in the exhibition scheduled for September 21 through 30 in Concord, Georgia.

Birney Imes has captured the vanishing culture of his native Mississippi since the early 1970’s in photographs that have been characterized as honest, gritty, idiosyncratic, and moving. His iconic images of juke joints and dilapidated local gathering spots are on permanent display in over 20 museums and private collections in the United States and Europe.

Sylvia Plachy has been recording New York City’s visual and cultural landscape and its diverse residents for over 40 years. She has been a staff photographer at The Village Voice for thirty years and a regular contributor at The New Yorker. Her powerful and memorable images have been seen in one-woman shows and museums throughout the United States, Europe and China.

“SlowExposures” 2007 will feature two categories. “Images of the Rural South” can include images taken anywhere in the Southeastern states. “Photographs from West Central Georgia” can include images taken anywhere in Bibb, Coweta, Crawford, Harris, Heard, Lamar, Meriwether, Monroe, Muscogee, Spalding, Talbot, Taylor, Troup and Upson Counties in addition to Pike County, home of “SlowExposures.” Photographers may enter up to four images in each category with the final winners sharing up to $2,000 in awards in September.

The competition's aim would seem too narrow if the subject wasn't a place so tied up in the history and struggles of humanity, whether one approaches through the Civil War and the burning of Atlanta, the causes and consequences of the Civil Rights movement, or the realm of Southern Gothic, inhabited by the likes of Harper Lee and Flannery O'Connor. Check it out here.