All images ©Frank Hallam Day

Frank Hallam Day‘s artistic interests revolve around the themes of culture and history, and humanity’s footprint on the natural world. For months he traveled around Florida, photographing recreational vehicles lodged in jungle settings at night. He used hand-held lights and a tripod; the RV occupants never knew he was there. The resulting images, he explains in an artist’s statement, suggest alienation from dark, ominous nature. “[The RVs] crouch like steel insects in the woods, shining, hard carapaces protecting a soft interior. They brand themselves with labels asserting a desired yet ironically thwarted relationship with nature:  Escaper, Conquest, Sunset Trail, Wilderness, Cougar, Falcon…Nothing is more American than an RV, but these pictures suggest other impulses underlying the sheen of the American dream:  flight, concealment, isolation, bewilderment and withdrawal.” Kehrer Verlag has published the work in Hallam’s new book Nocturnal, which will be available March 19. (more…)

© Anderson Scott

In the make-believe world of Civil War reenactors, earnest nostalgia can bump up against reality, and Atlanta photographer Anderson Scott has an eye for the humorous, ironic and sometimes disturbing consequences. Having grown up in Montgomery, Alabama, he explains, “I knew lots of people who obsessed about the Civil War. It seemed like an odd-but-harmless hobby, sort of like collecting toy trains. I did not think too much about it.

“Many years later, I stumbled onto a Civil War reenactment. What I found was a group of people living in a more or less (often less) accurate facsimile of life on the march during the Civil War. The reenactors were in period dress, which was striking and made for interesting photographs. But more than that, I got the sense that some of these people were frighteningly serious about their alternate reality–by which I mean that the reenactment included some people who thought the world would be a better place had the South won, with all that that entails, including slavery. I decided I wanted to know more.”

Scott began to photograph Civil War reenactments and neo-Confederate events in Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Florida and the Carolinas. The project has just been published as a book titled Whistling Dixie from Columbia College Chicago Press. More images from the project can viewed at Scott’s website. (more…)

©Bob Adelman, Selma, Alabama, 1965

As a form of propaganda, activist photography tends not to stand the test of time. But among the many striking and even iconic images of the Civil Rights Movement were images shot by photographers who were working from within, particularly as members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Some of their images endure for the formal beauty and raw emotion–not to mention the undeniable and systematic injustice–that they portray. University Press of Mississippi has just published 156 photographs by nine photographers in This Light of Ours: Activist Photographers of the Civil Rights Movement. “Together the photographs and text remind us that the movement was a battleground, that the battle was successfully fought by thousands of ‘ordinary’ Americans…and that the Movement’s moral vision and impact continue to shape our lives,” the publisher says. Images by Bob Adelman, who went on to a successful career as a photojournalist, stand out in particular. Also included in the book are some noteworthy images by George Ballis, Bob Fitch, Bob Fletcher, Matt Herron, David Prince, Herbert Randall, Maria Varela and Tamio Wakayama. with personal accounts of covering the Civil Rights movement by several of the photographers. (more…)

All images ©Ellen Fisch

Ellen Fisch studied photography and architectural drawing in college, and went on to lead two separate artistic lives: one as a photographer, the other as a painter. “I never combined the two,” she says. For the past 12 years she has focused on photography and says “I did OK as an architectural photographer,” but she adds, “I missed drawing and painting.” So she started drawing on her photographs with pencil, pastel, charcoal, and gold leaf. The results surprised and intrigued her. “I noticed that when used as accents and in small amounts, other art materials add depth and subtle nuances to photography.” She describes her technique as “enhanced photography.” She shoots digitally, desaturates the images before printing them on a fiber-based paper, and then draws on them. “I like the blacks,” she says. “I have the ability to [draw in] the real darks, and highlight the foliage so it appears to be capturing the light on the surface.” The images shown here are from Fisch’s “Park Slope/Prospect Park” series, which is currently on view at Jadite Galleries, 413 W 50th Street in New York, through February 26. Fisch will be at the gallery on Saturday, February 23 from 1-6 p.m. (more…)

Leverkusen–All images ©Oliver Kern

Cultures and landscapes shape each other in distinctive ways, but the dynamic is often subtle, even mysterious. German photographer Oliver Kern has been exploring that dynamic in his native country by seeking “strangely familiar images from everyday German life” which “capture characteristic atmospheres.” He takes his photographs on the road, in parking lots, at events, or in supermarkets, focusing on the relationships between people, structures, and the landscape, which is “only ostensibly unchanging, [but] in a permanent state of reconstruction.” Not surprisingly, the often-elusive sense of place is in the details and discrete symbols, not the grand ones, which “have long lost their meaning in people’s everyday lives,” Kern says. He has collected about fifty images taken over the course of his travels since 2002 for his new book, A German View, released earlier this month by Hatje Cantz Verlag.–Courtesy of the publisher.

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