Pieces of Light

A Six Feet Photography Project Exhibition

Durham Arts Council, opened October - November 2021

Exhibition Catalog PDF

Semans Gallery

Dark and Light Alike

We can all remember when the Covid reality fully hit us, that moment when we were forced to confront the stark news and the hard arrival of abrupt changes. I was photographing in Mississippi in early March 2020, on spring break from teaching at Duke. I washed my hands incessantly driving across the South from North Carolina to Mississippi, kept sanitizer close at all times, and tried to puzzle out how to respond to the invisible, infectious threats, how to stay safe and productive. I was mostly photographing outside, and remember trying to understand and accept this gathering mystery. An email arrived announcing that spring break would be extended another week, all Duke classes would move online, and with that began a collective retreat into the virtual and isolated refuge of distance. We would stay at six feet and farther, adapt and adjust, do whatever needed to be done.

Pieces of Light takes us through this time from the perspective of forty-seven image makers across the Southeast. How should we respond as photographers, as image makers, as documentary artists, we all pondered from the beginning? We discussed what to do, what our role might be, how images could mark moments and time, the known and the hidden, regardless of how little sense we could make of a pandemic. While there are perhaps no universal feelings about the shared experience, there is, I believe, an impression that we’ve all experienced a tangle of time, a displacement from the normal markers and seasons, an absence of our regular signposts on the calendar. Amidst the diversity of ways we’ve managed the many interruptions and anxieties, the unknowing and the seeming to know, there’s shared understanding of a narrowing and shortening of our movements, maps, and itineraries. 

What’s here in this exhibition is far more than a response to the news and Covid weather, or the flash of a single event. Rather, this is a reply from forty-seven artists to an ongoing condition, the confusion of an evolving infection, a coerced isolation, a shrinking of our collective paths. With the tightening of geography, we’ve gained vision that looks closer and with more intimacy, viewing through a singular sameness with fresh clarity. If there is hopefulness here it is in the realization that there’s forever more to see, to compose, to transform into an image, always before us a temporal luminance in an otherwise dimming day. 

There is a recognizable evil tyranny in assuming, in taking the day-to-day for granted. We like to think we know better (“Here today, gone tomorrow,” and all that). Whatever we know doesn’t prevent us from the familiar condition that when at home the protagonist wishes to be away, and when away the deepest wish is often to be at home. The work we see here grows out of an acceptance of the tightening circle of place, and of getting busy to affirm through images the fullness in wonders close to home. 

Wendell Berry, in his short poem, To Know the Dark, writes, 

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light

To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight. 

And to enter that darkness carefully, with little light and therefore sight, can lead us, Berry continues, to “find that the dark, too, blooms and sings . . .” 

Photographers—and photographs—get all they have from embracing the darkness and light equally, shadows adjacent to highlights, contrast next to flatness, what is present alongside what has gone, low valleys juxtaposed with the peaks. The opposites are coequal and mutually dependent, elemental to how we see. The last line from Psalm 139:12: “the darkness and the light are both alike to you.” Alike, I argue, in that both offer us a frontier to explore, render, and move to reveal, a time and place to take full visual advantage of the mystery and the unknown. 

– Tom Rankin

Losing Dexter

My dog Dexter, a constant companion for nearly 12 years, was with me on nearly every photographic outing. During the pandemic, he defined my days — every moment was spent in his presence. Any sense of normality I experienced in 2020 I owe to him. 

Dexter died in early 2021 after a brief illness, and I was overwhelmed with sadness, not just for my loss, but by a sense of how unfair it was to him with so much love to give in such a short life.

After months of grieving, I set out again with my camera to photograph landscapes along Jordan Lake on a foggy morning in March. The fog softened all but the closest details, and its silence and stillness offered insulation from the rest of the world. The landscape, stark against the softness, formed into shapes — a new alphabet for a language I needed to understand.

I found myself looking for Dexter in this place we’d shared together and wanting to see this place from his perspective. I made these photographs closer to the ground, from his viewpoint. As I made these images, I felt connected and at peace knowing that Dexter would always be a part of me, and that he would always influence my view of the world.

– Dennis Szerszen

Two Pandemics

Once more we are in the darkness of the wilderness. Racism, like Covid, is a persistent infection that affects us all. The very same issues take the lives of Black people today as in 1619. America was built on a cruel, unjust, exploitative, and oppressive system that profits from the abuse and exclusion of her Black citizens. 

I often think of young Black boys, beautiful Black boys whose breath is silenced, extinguished before the spark of life comes to flame. Their fire leaves, driven out by a hateful world that forces them into invisibility. Learning to not be seen is a political act that evolves into a means of Black survival. That survival demands that one negate Black skin, Black hearts, Black brains, Black love, Black worlds such that much of Black life is a drawn-out misery. 

While photographing the march for Andrew Brown Jr. in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, I saw a group of Black men wearing tee-shirts stating “Justice for Christian Griggs.” Christian was a 22-year-old Black veteran from Angier, North Carolina, who was shot six times, four times in his back, by a White minister, the father of his girlfriend. No charges were filed, even though the coroner said the bullets in his back were fired when Christian was lying face down on the ground. Sounds like an execution. 

When I was traveling to Raeford, North Carolina, to photograph the funeral services for George Floyd, 500 feet from the turn south, I headed north to Washington, DC. I wanted to witness 16th Street painted with Black Lives Matter before traffic or rain wore it away. What I found and experienced was a gathering of so many young people, Black, Native, White, Latino, and Asian, standing together protesting, saying in unison “Black Lives Matter, Say Her Name, and I Can’t Breathe!” We were all together in defiance of two pandemics. I needed to witness that hope. 

In this time, many “liberals” opine that we have lost our moral authority. But I say this nation, whose flag we salute, never had moral authority but for a few fleeting moments when the ideals of democracy and justice for all were first articulated. I have begun to question whether we have the right to continue as a species on this blue planet. There are many more loving and kind species living in harmony, not seeking to destroy each other.

– Titus Brooks Heagins

Allenton Gallery

Genius Loci: Spirit of Place

We are humans on the slow road to remembering. An enmeshed understanding of place is at the root of making sense of the world around us. Our individual and collective relationships to place encourage us to unlearn the notion of humanity as a separate entity from everything else that we call “nature”.

We seek the simplest of truths revealed to us in the primal elemental power of flames, ash, and ice, and in the glow of life-giving light passing through a leaf and the charged clouds overhead. In this exhibition of photographs from across the Western North Carolina landscape, we tend to our own deeply personal connections with the seemingly non-human facets of our environment in order to approach a more lush understanding of where we are and how we belong. 

The unique and introspective opportunity provided by the act of viewing photographs, and arguably by the act of making photographs as well, allows this collection of images to foster a rich and embodied connection to place. Through our individual photographic practices, we nurture our entanglement with the land and explore the complexities of our evolving relationship with it. 

By uplifting intimate portraits of plants with robust medicinal and folkloric significance alongside the thoughtful documentation of burning and frostbitten forests, held in the embrace of some of the oldest mountains in the world, we un-numb ourselves to the unending gifts that surround us and celebrate the rich biodiversity of our home. We are hopeful this work will inspire viewers to recall and make visible their own experiences of placemaking and to connect more deeply with the role they play in their own human and non-human community.

–Anna Norton, Evan Anderson, Jack Sorokin, Jesse Barber, Mike Belleme, Shauna Caldwell

Pop-up Exhibitions

Light From Other Days by Anna Gage Norton

Neither solitude nor observation were strangers to me before the pandemic, and it took many months for the weight of quarantine to set in. In retrospect many months later, I am grateful for the removal of distraction during that time. For some change of scenery, I took daily walks in my neighborhood and was usually the only person on the street. Free of traffic, the streets were filled with dancing silhouettes and hundreds of sunspot images that changed along with the seasons and canopy coverage. 

This installation of alternating scenes of light and shadow playing upon asphalt is a poetic representation of my process of deeply looking at the often overlooked. The Light From Other Days video installation creates a sense of being caught by one fleeting gesture after another. Featured field recordings include the sounds of nature within the built environment of my neighborhood.

Spectrum of Hope by Liz Williams

Since the start of the pandemic, the Queer community has worked hard to create bonds and learn from each other. During this time of isolation for everyone, especially for queer communities that are so often “othered,” we searched for ways to feel and express hope. We recognized that we’re not alone, and discovered so many new accessible ways for us to connect. 

Building upon this idea of connection and hope, I asked trans and queer participants to share images of significant items that to them symbolize hope. With a projector, I illuminated the model’s face with that image and later interviewed them about their decision to choose that symbol. I also invited the models to share words of inspiration and encouragement and projected those chosen phrases onto their bodies.

Through this series, which included a pop-up exhibition of photographs and a video installation, I invite the viewer to see the commonality between themselves and the models and to recognize and find the universal thread of hope. We all want to be seen and understood, especially when we share our needs and vulnerabilities. This willingness to express vulnerability is important because it helps build bridges to people outside of our immediate circles–by tearing down these barriers that keep us insulated, we build communities of hope during this time that feels especially dire.

Additionally, a video installation of this work will be featured on October 15th, 6- 8 pm during Durham Third Friday at the Durham Arts Council.