N. C. Department of Cultural Resources’ Featured Photographers
Rob Amberg of Marshall photographs day-to-day scenes and says in those ordinary moments we find universal truths. As a participant/observer of his environment, he takes photographs that inform about time, place and people. His photographs and writing from the rural South are published and exhibited internationally. He received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, N.C Arts Council, Simon Guggenheim Foundation and others. His award-winning book, “Sodom Laurel Album,” was published in 2002; another title will be published in 2009.
Byron Baldwin of Charlotte in his photographs conveys a sense of time and space that feels familiar and comfortable, and that connects us with events and people. He is a founding member of The Light Factory gallery in Charlotte and has been a teacher at area colleges and universities for 30 years. His work is exhibited widely and is included in the collections of the High Museum in Atlanta, Bank of America, the State Museum of South Carolina and numerous private collections. He is the recipient of numerous awards and grants. His book, “The 521 All-Stars, A Championship Story of Baseball and Community,” was published in 1999.
Tom Braswell of Wilson creates photographs that reflect the interconnectedness of nature, spirit and culture, and the landscape as spiritual image. He reflects the order enfolded in nature and the correspondence between earth and consciousness. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English and a masters of fine arts degree. He was a writer-in-residence for North Carolina’s Third Century Artist Program and has taught photography at several colleges and universities in North and South Carolina. His work has been shown across the United States and in China. He is an artist/educator/curator who works in several photography formats, in printmaking and other media.
Andrea Brown of Charlotte references themes of identity, temporality and memory in her photographs. Lacking specific boundaries, each image allows the viewer to rearrange and relate the image to their own experiences. The Asheville native says her family life and scenic surroundings are inspirations for her work. Her photographs have been exhibited in Atlanta and Charlotte. She received the Best in Show award at the Shepard Center Photo Contest in 2008. The High Museum photography curator rated her as an “artist to watch.”
Paul Dagys of Cary believes that when a photographer follows his heart the camera can become an open window into the soul. In his photography he searches for truth and beauty, inspired by reality. He holds a degree in photojournalism and prefers fact over fantasy in his art photography. His work has been published in many magazines including Time, Life, Smithsonian and People. He has exhibited at Robin Rice Gallery in New York, Duke University and other venues, and has received grants from the United Arts Council of Raleigh and Wake County. He conducts workshops in meditative photography; his first book, “The Sounds of Silence,” is to be published in fall of 2008.
W. Cameron Dennis of Winston-Salem is always conscious of the place between abstractions and the world of appearances. He finds that the power of a photograph is in its implied veracity – the connection of the photograph to the object in front of the lens. He has exhibited widely, and his work has been published in regional periodicals. He received photography fellowships from the Southern Arts Federation and the N.C. Arts Council, and won awards in regional and national juried competitions. His work is in several public and private collections.
Bob Donnan of Winston-Salem fell in love with traditional black-and-white photography while working on the yearbook staff in his hometown of Chapel Hill. He was photo editor of the UNC-Chapel Hill yearbook, Yackety Yack, and earned a degree in business administration. He feels lucky as a photographer to help the citizens of North Carolina tell their stories and to share its diverse landscape and people. His photographs have appeared in Newsweek, Business Week, Southern Living and Food & Wine magazines. Also known for sports photography, Donnan has taken photographs that appeared on two covers for Sports Illustrated. He covered the 2008 Olympics in Beijing for USPresswire photo agency.
Taj Forer of Hillsborough approaches creating images with a sensitivity to suggestion, personal exploration and a deep concern for the earth’s well being. He believes a beneficial relationship between individuals and with the environment is attainable. He is recipient of a fellowship at the Contemporary Art Museum in Raleigh. He is also co-founder of Daylight Magazine, an award-winning biannual publication of contemporary documentary photography. His photographs are in collections of the N.C. Museum of Art and in public and private collections worldwide.
Titus Brooks Heagins of Durham documents the lives of people of color the world over, and he is particularly interested in the descendants of Africa living in the Western Hemisphere. His documentary style celebrates aspects of lives that are typically hidden and seeks to capture in the essence of a single event the totality of the human experience. His work is included in the collections of the N.C. Museum of Art, Smithsonian Anacostia Museum of African American Art and History, Casa de Africa, Havana, Cuba and others. He has won awards and fellowships from the American Photographic Institute, the University of Michigan and others.
Lisa Holder of Charlotte explores issues of memory and identity in her photographs. She is a mixed-media artist who employs alternative techniques. Through performance-based self-portraiture, she attempts to disrupt the expectations and preconceived notions on the role of women. She exhibited at the Women of the Congo Event in New York in June 2008 and was named artist-in-residence at the McColl Center for Visual Art in Charlotte in the spring of 2008.
Bruce Melkowits of Chapel Hill believes that each image should both contain and enlarge the universe. He is attracted to organic forms and reduces each image to its barest essentials to discover how little is needed to create an image that resonates. He works with kallitypes, an antique photographic process, which is a slow construction process that also seems to grow organically. His work has been shown in group shows nationally and also in Canada and China. He has won awards from the Durham Arts Council, Savannah Arts on the River Juried Show, the North Carolina Photographers’ Annual Show and others.
Susan Harbage Page of Chapel Hill creates images that are seductively disturbing, feminist and anti-racist. The works divulge layers of meaning in media that include photographs, altered textiles and video installations. She is recipient of several grants and awards including a Fulbright Travel grant, UNC-Chapel Hill Center for the Study of the American South research grant, and two N.C. Arts Council fellowships. She has been exhibited in the U.S., Bulgaria, Italy, France, Germany, Israel and China, and is in collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, the High Museum of Art, the Mint Museum of Art and the Israel Museum. Since 2003, four books of her work have been published.
Pamela Pecchio of Asheville creates photographs that record the way humans live. Our homes are our caves, nests and source of shelter; she examines the intentional marks we make and the unintentional marks that show habitation. She believes that our homes witness time and that walls can document our inhabitance. Her interests are the home’s inanimate objects and marks, which signify temporal experience and patterns of living. She has exhibited in the eastern U.S and in Spain, and received several awards for teaching art. Her work is in the collection of Yale University.
Linda Foard Roberts of Charlotte and Waxhaw aims to capture the cycles of life and passage of time in her photography. For many years she attempted to find solace from the fear of death in her work, and she believes we must recognize that we all will soon be part of the past. She is a recipient of the 2008 North Carolina Visual Artist Fellowship grant and was selected for “Photography Now: One Hundred Portfolios” from among 1,300 entries representing 60 countries. Her work will be shown at the Sol del Rio gallery in Guatemala in September 2008 and also is in the collections of BankAmerica, Fidelity Investments, the Mint Museum, and Haarman & Reimer, West Germany.
John Rosenthal of Chapel Hill once photographed in black and white only, feeling that genre demanded stricter composition. He wanted photographs not to promote the subject but to startle the viewer. In 2007 he switched to color photography and digital print-making to photograph New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, using color to reflect a beloved space rather than black and white to emphasize a grim reality. That series, “Then, Absent” was exhibited in New Orleans in 2008. His writings and photographs have appeared in various periodicals, and in 1998 he published the collection of photographs, “Regarding Manhattan.”
Margaret Sartor of Durham has found that looking back can be the best way to go forward to get proper perspective in life. This often leads her to facing the vulnerabilities of an unpredictable world. As a writer, Sartor explores the same emotional territory shown in her photographs. Her works are widely exhibited and published in periodicals including DoubleTake, Esquire, the New Yorker and others. Her photographs are in the collections of the Museum of Fine Art in Houston, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art and N.C. Museum of Art. The most recent of her three books is the 2006-published “Miss American Pie: A Diary of Love, Secrets, and Growing Up in the 1970s.”
Alice Sebrell of Asheville takes photographs that highlight the human inclination to hide from things. Her photographs use sculpturally-altered animal forms with added text to pose questions about the individual, hidden history and what a person will do to survive. Her work is exhibited nationally and internationally, and is in the collections of the Asheville Art Museum, Bank of America, R.J. Reynolds and other public and private collections. She received grants from the N.C. Arts Council and the Charlotte/Mecklenburg Arts & Science Council.
Susan Simone of Chapel Hill calls her photography “Doc-u-Art” because each work is a documentary story that may be tied to a social issue, or a reaction to a place or event that she has seen. She has captured the lives of Cuban women, housekeepers at UNC-Chapel Hill, the state’s Hispanic community and the people of Katmandu, Nepal. Her works are a witness of people’s lives told through her memory. She uses digital photographs and scans and Photoshop to merge images, and prints on fabric and archival papers as well. She has exhibited regionally and her works are in public collections in piedmont North Carolina. She was a recipient of a N.C. Arts Council Fellowship.
Chris Sims of Durham and Efland has been working on one project since 2001, a photographic examination of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq from the American home front. His vision is informed by his work as a photo archivist at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. He seeks out manifestations of the American understanding of what it means to be at war, and how these meanings are communicated through images. He photographs with an eye toward creation of a historical record rather than immediate publication. He won the PDN (Photo District News magazine) Photography Annual Best Photography Award in 2003, 2007 and 2008, and fellowships from the Maryland Institute College of Art, UNC-Chapel Hill and other awards.
David Spear of Madison is a humanist. All of his work involves people and the human condition. His first book, “The Neugents,” was a portrait of his neighbors, followed by “Visible Spirits,” portraits of Mexico, published in 1993 and 2006, respectively. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Headlands Center for the Arts Fellowship, and N.C. Arts Council Artist Project grant. He has exhibited at the Ackland Museum, Chapel Hill; Louisiana Tech University, Ruston, La., and other venues. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York City; the Museum of Fine Art, Houston, Tex.; New Orleans Museum of Art; and the Ackland Museum, Chapel Hill.
Jane Terry of Raleigh reflects personal myth and truth in her work using images that result from a blending of spontaneity, chance and intervention. She hopes her work conveys the collective experience of loss and memory. Her photographs are the result of epiphanies revealed through certain images that haunt and inform. Events in her life reference her mother’s death and emerge in her art. She received numerous grants and awards for her work and has exhibited at the San Francisco Art Institute, the N.C. Museum of Art, Louise K. Meisel Gallery in New York and other venues. Her work is included in several private collections.