Rob McDonald - Birdhouses - A Novel Experience Bookstore - Zebulon, Georgia

Rob McDonald is a native of South Carolina and lived in both Tennessee and Texas before moving to Virginia in 1992. Currently, he is a professor of English and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at Virginia Military Institute. Self-taught as a photographer, he holds a doctorate in American literature and specializes in the literature and culture of the American South. His publications include The Critical Response to Erskine Caldwell, Erskine Caldwell: Selected Letters, 1929-1955, and Southern Women Playwrights: New Essays on Literary History and Criticism. His most recent book is Reading Erskine Caldwell: New Essays (2006). He has also written on photography, including studies of Jack Spencer (Southern Quarterly) and William Christenberry (CrossRoads 2006).

My worldview is colored by an obsession with place. It dominates my sense of everything: I am always trying to locate a person, an object, a structure—to connect it to its source.

The photographs in the Birdhouses portfolio, from the ongoing series Southern Places, represent a personal exploration of the relationship between place and identity: meditations on home.

In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard suggests that “When we examine a nest, we place ourselves at the origin of confidence in the world.” I have been fascinated to contemplate the design and placement of the birdhouses I have found and photographed for this portfolio. Constructed of unfinished and unadorned materials, they seem to me avian equivalents of the vernacular architecture found along backroads. Birds live, or have lived, in some of the houses, but not all. Some have sat vacant since they were installed, their builders leaving them as decoration, or suggestion.

Although my work is very different from his, my friend William Christenberry is the artist who has most influenced my thinking about the art of photography. Studying his photographs, paintings, and sculpture, long before I used my own camera seriously, I learned about vision.

For equipment, I prefer the old and the unconventional: my favorite cameras are a vintage Rolleiflex TLR and a modified Holga. I work primarily in medium-format black and white, which I print and tone in my darkroom. Given the personal, reflective nature of my work, I prefer small prints, usually 7”x7” or 5”x5”.

To lean more about Rob McDonald and his photography, visit his website at www.robmcdonaldphotography.com/


W.A. Chamberlain - Disappearing Architecture of the Rural South - The Whiskey Bonding Barn - Molena, Georgia

Nationally recognized photographer and Pike County resident W.A. Chamberlain will exhibit at the Whiskey Bonding Barn during SlowExposures 2008. The solo show at the National Historic Register-listed Whiskey Bonding Barn includes images from two series of work pursued by the photographer over the past four years. Fading Fast: Disappearing Architecture of the Rural South includes many images of early 20th century buildings in Pike, Lamar, Upson and Crawford counties. The series Lost Highways of the South includes images of churches, theaters and commercial buildings in rural Georgia and South Carolina.

The photographs document buildings and artifacts that were important to communities when agriculture, especially the cultivation of cotton, was a driving force of rural life. The architectural legacy of “King Cotton” is quickly disappearing as these structures fall into disrepair, are demolished, or are refurbished into spaces bearing no resemblance to historic uses. W.A. Chamberlain’s photographs capture the memories of an era and inspire us to imagine what life was like in a simpler and less technological time.

The exhibit will be open to the public on Saturday, September 20 from 11 am to 5 pm, on Saturday, September 27 from 11 am to 5 pm and Sunday, September 28 from 1 pm to 4 pm. The exhibited images and prints will be available for purchase with a portion of the proceeds going toward the on-going renovation of the Barn. Mr. Chamberlain will be on site to provide information on the images. The curator for this show is Andrea Noel of Pike County.

Mr. Chamberlain’s work hangs in residences and commercial/professional offices in the metropolitan Atlanta region, in Laguna Beach, Orlando, Sarasota, and Rochester. His work has been selected for the Madison National Art Show in Madison, Georgia for the past several years in addition to being awarded honors in metropolitan Atlanta exhibitions. He has been juried into SlowExposures in 2007 and again in 2008.