Category: Uncategorized

Parker James Reinecker is a street / documentary photographer and lens-based media artist based in North Carolina. He is currently working in Northern Georgia, Northeastern Pennsylvania, and the American Southwest. Growing up in coal country, Scranton Pennsylvania, with a bar and a church on every corner, his work touches on the experience and struggle of growing up in the blue-collar United States. Drawing inspiration from his own struggles with personal identity, crime and homelessness which can be conceptually suggested within the compositions of heavy highlight and deep shadows. Parker’s images and series develop symbolic narratives while immersed in his relationship to the broken landscape of “Small Town America” and the conflict of poverty and beliefs, values and traditions, hope within the broken dreams and some touches of humor within it all. Parker is an MFA recipient from Savannah College of Art and Design and full-time Visual Arts Professor at Rowan-Cabarrus Community College in Salisbury North Carolina.

Allison Jarek is an American photographer whose work explores themes such as man’s relationship with nature, female identity, and personal journeys. She received her MFA in Photography from Texas Woman’s University in the spring of 2015 and her BFA in Photography from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2011. Her work has been shown nationally, at venues such as SlowExposures, New Orleans Photo Alliance, the University of Central Florida, PhotoNOLA, and Clemson University, and featured in publications such as The Oxford American magazine, FotoFilmic, SHOTS Magazine, The Hand magazine, Lenscratch, and South x Southeast Photomagazine. She currently lives in Atlanta, Georgia and is Co-Founder and Director for the nonprofit Illuminate Atlanta.

Susan Bryant is a fine art photographer who lives and works in Clarksville, Tennessee, where she recently retired after teaching analog photography for 37 years at Austin Peay State University.

Her personal, creative work includes black & white gelatin silver prints, hand-colored gelatin silver prints, digital photographs, and in the last 10 years, the 19th century wet plate collodion process which yields glass negatives and positives, tintypes and ambrotypes. In her recent work, she integrates the 19^th century wet plate process with 21^st century digital technology. Her photographic work explores still-lifes of personal, meaningful objects, unconventional portraits and her most recent body of work, Southward, explores the landscape of the American Southeast region.

Her work has been included in over 100 (selected) juried and invitational group exhibits and 28 (selected) solo exhibits across the United States. She is the recipient of a Tennessee Arts Commission Fellowship in photography. She is the recipient of two fellowship at the Hambidge Center Artist Residency (2016 & 2017) and three residencies at A.I.R. Studio Paducah (2015, 2016, 2018). She has been selected for a 2- week winter residency at Penland School for Craft for January 2020 and has been invited to teach a photography workshop there in August of 2020.

Her work has been included in 5 of the past 6 (2012-2017) MANIFEST: INPHA: An Annual International Publication of Contemporary Photography, published by Manifest Gallery in Cincinnati.  Two of her images were published in the 2017 Creative Quarterly 49, an International Journal of Art & Design. Her work is included in numerous public and corporate collections including the Tennessee State Museum, the Knoxville Museum of Art, Vanderbilt Medical Center, The Photographic Archives, University of Louisville and the Center for Photography at Woodstock, NY. She was represented by The Cumberland Gallery in Nashville for 30 years until its closing in 2019.

Deeply connected to her Southern roots, Joy’s images reveal her endless intrigue with Georgia heritage and culture, mainly its sea islands and their dynamically stable surroundings. It serves as an ongoing inspiration for creating photographs that capture and reemphasize the importance of history and preservation of volatile places. Driven by an inherent love and beauty of her birthright, her images convey the natural through technology and back again with traditional mediums, principles and processes. Always exploring. Always experimenting. A graduate of the Savannah College of Art and Design, she has participated in several group exhibitions mainly at the Photopoint Gallery (Richmond Hill, GA), Location Gallery and the Telfair for the Arts (Savannah, GA). She is also Design Director at JOY Marketing.

Peter Essick is a photographer, author, speaker, instructor, and drone pilot who specializes in nature and environmental themes. Named one of the 40 most influential nature photographers in the world by Outdoor Photography Magazine UK, Essick has been influenced by many noted American landscape photographers from Carleton Watkins to Robert Adams. His goal is to make photographs that move beyond mere documentation to reveal in careful compositions the human impact of development as well as the enduring power of the land.

Essick is the author of two books of his photographs, The Ansel Adams Wilderness, and Our Beautiful, Fragile World. He has had solo exhibitions of his work at the Booth Western Art Museum, Yoho National Park: A Canadian Gem, and at Lumière Gallery, Compositions in Nature. Essick has photographed stories for National Geographic on many environmental issues including climate change, high-tech trash, nuclear waste and freshwater. Other work has been published in international magazines. Essick’s photographs are in public and private collections. He is represented by Spalding Nix Gallery in Atlanta, Georgia and Cavan Images, New York, New York.

Currently, Essick is working on a book of his photographs about Fernbank Forest, an urban old-growth forest in Atlanta, and will be published by Fall Line Press in the Spring 2020.

Alexander Diaz is an Associate Professor of Photography at the University of North Florida. Diaz’s artwork is a marriage of documentary photography and conceptual art. He utilizes photography to express his concerns and to comment on environmental issues, consumerism, religion, and the particulars of place. His work has been exhibited at many institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art/Jacksonville, Norton Museum of Art, and Mobile Museum of Art.

Parker James Reinecker is a street / documentary photographer and lens-based media artist based in North Carolina. He is currently working in Northern Georgia, Northeastern Pennsylvania, and the American Southwest. Growing up in coal country, Scranton Pennsylvania, with a bar and a church on every corner, his work touches on the experience and struggle of growing up in the blue-collar United States. Drawing inspiration from his own struggles with personal identity, crime and homelessness which can be conceptually suggested within the compositions of heavy highlight and deep shadows. Parker’s images and series develop symbolic narratives while immersed in his relationship to the broken landscape of “Small Town America” and the conflict of poverty and beliefs, values and traditions, hope within the broken dreams and some touches of humor within it all. Parker is an MFA recipient from Savannah College of Art and Design and full-time Visual Arts Professor at Rowan-Cabarrus Community College in Salisbury North Carolina.

I received my MFA from Louisiana State University in photography in MFA in 2009.  Presently, I am a  visual art teacher in the Talented Visual Art program in Zachary Louisiana.  Also, I freelance for the Baton Rouge Advocate newspaper.

Richard Schramm has been exploring the South with his camera for over forty years, but only with his retirement in 2016 has he been able to devote full time to it.  His work has appeared in The Oxford American’s “Eyes on the South” series and has been selected for inclusion in the South Carolina Picture Project.  It has been featured in exhibitions at the Frank Community Gallery in Chapel Hill, NC, and at the South East Center for Photography in Greenville, SC.  In the spring of 2019 he had a  photo in “Our Common Core,” a South x Southeast exhibition on the Southern environment.