ReCap: Atlanta Celebrates Photography Portfolio Reviews

ReCap: Atlanta Celebrates Photography Portfolio Reviews by Aline SmithsonJune 8, 2022

It’s always such a pleasure to review portfolios and spend time with artists discussing their projects. I recently had the opportunity to meet and speak with group of dedicated photographers through the Atlanta Celebrates Photography Reviews, via Zoom. Today I am sharing some of the work seen at the reviews.

Raul Rodriguez is a photographer, artist, curator and educator from Fort Worth, Texas. He graduated with a BFA from the University of North Texas College of Visual Arts and Design with a focus in Photography. As an artist he investigates communities and cultures like skateboarding, boxing, and Lucha Libre, as well as social justice topics linked to the Latino identity. His projects reveal the layers and complexities of his personal and cultural experience as a first generation Mexican-American. Rodriguez is also editor-in-chief of Deep Red Press. @deepred.press

Follow Raul on Instagram: @witofrito

©Raul Rodriguez

Marine Park is a photographic series centering around a small skatepark that many local skateboarders have found community and solace in. The photographs share the faces and details that can be found in an otherwise bare and makeshift course that many lower income and communities of color may experience. We make due and find peace within the skatepark’s unique personality.

©Raul Rodriguez

©Raul Rodriguez

Semaj Campbell is a Brooklyn, NY native. Semaj studied psychology at Trinity College(CT), graduating in May 2018, and is now currently pursuing his MFA at Lesley University (Boston, MA). Inspired by the works of Gordon Parks, Deanna Lawson, Latoya Ruby Frazier, Angelica Dass, Chi Modu and Bruce Gilden, Semaj seeks to reimagine the black gaze through his personal narrative. Semaj challenges the historical prejudices, racism, and false narratives that have haunted the depiction of black figures in society throughout generations. His photographs seek to provide a voice for everyday people who have been oppressed and ultimately discarded out of society’s forefront.

Follow Semaj on Instagram @semaj.doc

©Semaj Campbell

My work embodies the elements from the works of Latoya Ruby Frazier, Larry Clark, Gordon Parks, and Deanna Lawson. My photographs explore and deconstruct the linear narrative of black life, which has historically been misrepresented, exploited, and constrained to a narrow narrative. In my work, I seek to provide a voice for everyday people who have been oppressed and ultimately discarded out of society’s forefront. In this body of work, I document my family; exploring the complex dynamics within black families who have underlying and unaddressed traumas, which seem to plague through generations. I seek to utilize my family as a microcosm for black families struggling with a lineage of generational curses and traumas, while narrating a raw truth through a beautiful pain of perseverance.

©Semaj Campbell

©Semaj Campbell

©Semaj Campbell

Seth Adam Cook is an artist from the Bayou Teche region of south-central Louisiana. He utilizes the swamps and marshes of his home as a point of departure for his versatile studio practice. Cook holds a B.F.A. in studio art from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and an M.F.A. in photography from Indiana University, Bloomington. In 2021, he was awarded ‘Juror’s Selection’ from the New York Center for Photographic Art for his alternative process photography. In 2020, he was named one of Lenscratch’s ‘Top 25 to Watch.’ Also, in 2020, he accepted a ten-month residency with Manifest Creative Research Gallery and Drawing Center in Cincinnati, OH, where he worked and taught as their ‘Scholar in Residence.’ His work has been displayed nationally and internationally, including in South Korea, Louisiana, New York, California, Colorado, and Massachusetts.

Follow Seth on Instagram: @s.adamcook.art

©Seth Cook, Whereupon the Foundations Sunk

What I Saw in the Water highlights the deterioration of the Gulf Coast, reflecting the detriment born from the environmental catastrophes that linger across the landscape. Growing up facing the horrors of the BP Oil Spill and countlessly devastating hurricanes such as Katrina, this series reflects the current state of the Gulf Coast, pushing a conversation about growing up in the face of environmental destruction. By physically manipulating the photographic surface like wet paint, this project emphasizes our continued environmental neglect, breaking our illusion of controlling the problems we experience in the face of our ecosystem’s destruction.

©Seth Adam Cook, Domain Over the Sea

©Seth Adam Cook, Summer Swim

Karen Varsha is an Atlanta artist. Her current work as a still life photographer is influenced by her prior work photographing people and culture.
She exhibits her work in Atlanta juried shows and has recently displayed at the Swan House Gallery, Atlanta Photography Airport Show and the Marietta Cobb Museum of Art.

Follow Karen on instagram: @karenvarshaphotography

©Karen Varsha

My new Florals Still Life work began as a reaction to the quarantine and my husband’s treatment for cancer. One happened within a month of the other. I was so sad and began looking for an outlet for my grief. I found it in these prints which make me joyful and give my household hope.

©Karen Varsha

©Karen Varsha

Corinne Adams creates photography and mixed media images that evoke a world of dreams, symbols, imagination and mystery. Her work is in the permanent collections of The Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Gregg Museum of Art (Raleigh, N.C.), Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson and Los Angeles (LAX) International airports and in corporate collections nationwide. Corinne is co-curator of a permanent photography installation in the Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson’s international concourse, and she is included in the Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century Photography (2005, Routledge Press).

Corinne is co-founder of ATLANTA CELEBRATES PHOTOGRAPHY, the city’s 23-year-old annual photography festival held during October. Her work has been reviewed in such media as Contemporary (international art journal), ArtPapers, B&W Magazine, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and regional periodicals. She is represented by Soho Myriad Inc. and Faulkner & Locke (Atlanta).

Follow Corinne on Instagram: @corinne.adams.754

©Corrine Adams, Spirit of Place, Water

“I create iconic images in nature that speak to the sacredness of our environment and our interconnectedness to it. I pair modern digital technology with classic natural forms in and effort to create a new language and a new story about how we choose to relate to our world. Will we view it as worthy of spiritual respect and care — or will we cease to honor and protect the elemental resource that gives us life?”

©Corinne Adams, Arabia Mountain

Douglas R. Powell is a fine art photographer located in Atlanta, Georgia. After a career in law, Powell has returned to photography. He has garnered awards through the International Photography Awards, and the Atlanta Photography Group, including an exhibition at the the Atlanta Airport in 2020. He has self-published 7 photography books and his work has been included photography exhibitions in the Atlanta area.

“Benemérito” (“worthy” in English) is a fine art photography project, not documentary or street photography. While traveling in Merida, Mexico, I created a series of portraits of working people. Some of them had worked 50 years doing the same job every day without any recognition. The goal though my photography was to show the world how worthy they are of dignity and respect. I paired the portraits with the colorful walls of this historic Mayan City to add another layer of texture and history.

Yoram Gelman was born in 1940 in Palestine. Raised in Cleveland, Ohio and suburbs with degrees in Physics and Economics. Present intellectual interests are early music, mathematics, physics, and continuing general education. Gelaman began serious pursuit of photography in 2008, with special attraction in black and white to
curves, shadows, and abstractions from real objects, emphasizing tones rather than graphics.

Follow Yoram on Instagram: @ygelmanphoto

Lately I’ve come to understand my preferences by hearing the linguist Noam Chomsky, claiming that humans need art and music because there are things that can’t be said with words. My photographs are contemplative and speak by suggestion, often with minor elements leading outside the frame. I started taking photography seriously after I retired from teaching. Growing up, I always had artistic and musical abilities but never really studied them.

I think of my images as ideas, abstract fragments, resolving into thoughts. Contemplative images. My images sometimes invoke the context of what I call negative time, somewhat similar to negative space but where the relationship between objects in the image and the viewer involve an enigmatic reference to time.

I look for simplicity or abstracted simplicity in nature and human made structures. Shadows and silhouettes form curves and abstract shapes; I look for interesting relationships they offer.