making the virtual a reality
Eric Tomberlin has lived and worked as a freelance photographer, artist, and educator in California, New York, Texas, Washington, and India. Eric received his MFA in Studio Art from the University of Texas at Austin, and is currently an Associate Professor of Art at the University of North Carolina Asheville.
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.
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 19th century wet plate process with 21st 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.
Donna Wesley Spencer has been working on her ongoing project “A Southern Diary” for the past six years. She is a founding member of Perspective Gallery in Evanston, IL and divides her time between Evanston and Hillsborough, North Carolina.
Website: donnawesleyspencer.com
Instagram: donna_wesley_spencer
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.
Mark divides his time living in Atlanta, GA and the Isle of Skye, Scotland. His photographic life is also split between personal fine art photography and imaging in the field of ophthalmology.
His photography has been exhibited in museums and galleries across the US in addition to being included in public and private collections. A (12) print portfolio of his “Against the Grain” series was purchased by the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film for their permanent collection. He is represented by Lumiere Gallery in Atlanta, GA. and conducts workshops in both the US and on the Isle of Skye, Scotland. For more information: www.markmaio.com
Carolyn Hollingsworth lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia. She spent the first couple of decades of her life, and another more recent one, in Tennessee. Other than that and a year or so in both Massachusetts and Colorado, it has been Atlanta all the way. While not qualifying her as a true Atlanta native, she is inescapably Southern. Photography has been a lifelong passion but she enjoys working in various other media. She holds BFA and MFA degrees from Georgia State University where she made a valiant effort to study everything on offer in the entire art department.