This Year’s Click! Photography Festival Exhibit at NCMA Showcases the Work That Helped Artists Navigate a Difficult Year

INDYWEEK, OCT. 13, 2021 BY RACHEL SIMON

Over the past year and a half, countless North Carolinans have dealt with hardships ranging from illness to financial loss, often fighting their way through one obstacle only to find another waiting around the corner. It’s no wonder, then, that the theme of the new Click! Photography Festival exhibitnow open at the North Carolina Museum of Art (NCMA) is “persevere.”

Featuring 77 images from photographers across the country, the exhibit launched on October 1 and will be on view outside the museum, near the Ellipse along the eastern edge of the Ann and Jim Goodnight Museum Park, throughout the month.

Persevere is one of several photography events run by Click! Photography Festival, which is held annually every October. Although the themes differ for each exhibit, Persevere holds particular meaning, in light of the pandemic, for photographers and viewers alike.

“For many artists, the camera served as a tool of therapeutic intervention during the pandemic,” a NCMA press release reads. “Whether via a cell phone, DSLR, or 4X5, a camera helped rebalance and care for their emotional, spiritual, artistic, and mental needs. The process of creating a photographic image soothed our souls. Persevere is a selection of responses to the failures and ruptures in our world, but also how we expressed love, cared for ourselves and each other.”

The works featured in the exhibit were selected from over 400 submissions and were chosen by jurors Jennifer Dasal, NCMA’s curator of contemporary art, and de’Angelo Dia, a poet, theologian, and doctoral candidate at Union Presbyterian Seminary.

For photographer Penelope James, whose ethereal, black-and-white self-portraits depict her walking through water and resting in a bed of clouds, the contest was a way to temporarily put aside the claustrophobia of the pandemic.

“I couldn’t have the freedom to express myself or do what I wanted, so I just created these imaginative worlds in my living room,” James tells the INDY.

Taking the photos, she adds, “became an escape and really helped me persevere through the [pandemic]—just stick it out and keep going, like all of us did.”

Photographer Catherine Carter, meanwhile, says she chose to channel the “collective stress” of the last many months into the images she submitted to the festival. Three of the resulting works—striking, eerie photomontages created over the course of 2020 and 2021—are on display outside the museum.

“I believe that collecting images from artists/photographers about their response to these last few difficult years is a wonderful way to preserve and appreciate the emotional roller coaster that we have all experienced,” Carter says.

Visitors to the exhibit can walk along the photo-lined walls to see the many ways in which other artists chose to tackle the theme. While some of the images powerfully evoke the pain and struggle caused by the pandemic, others showcase optimism for the future and brighter takeaways about increased community support.

Persevere is far from the only photography exhibit to use art to showcase the ongoing effects of the pandemic. Last summer, The New-York Historical Society in Manhattan unveiled an outdoor installation displaying photos and stories of New Yorkers’ experiences in quarantine, and this September, the San Francisco Arts Commission and media organization CatchLight debuted an exhibition that highlighted the strength and spirit of the city’s residents.

And then online, there’s the Covid Photo Museum, which is described as the “world’s first virtual museum dedicated to the curation of photography captured during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

The museum, available to peruse without cost, features images submitted from both professional and amateur photographers across the globe. These have been and continue to be challenging times, but through art, people everywhere are able to share their experiences and bear witness to the pain and resilience of others.

While the photo exhibit outside NCMA will be on display through October, there will be an official walk-through of the exhibit on October 10 followed by a slideshow and a keynote presentation by photographer Titus Heagins.

Those unable to attend the event or visit NCMA will be able to view a slideshow of the selected images at the Click! Photo Fair on October 17 at the Durham Central Park Pavilion as well as in the windows of Durham’s 21c Museum Hotel until the month’s end.  

duke chronicle. Click! Photography Festival to engage regional photo community

By Amelia Martin 09/13/2017

The Click! Photography Festival, which occurs throughout the Triangle this October, includes workshops and discussions for the photographer community. Click! Photography Festival to engage regional photo community.

This October, Durham will host the Click! Photography Festival in celebration of North Carolina’s newly official Photography Month. The event will include exhibitions from some of the industry’s foremost artists, fostering dialogue between photographers and community members, supporting professional development and inspiring artistic excellence. At the heart of the festival is “The Fence,” the world’s largest photography public art exhibit. “The Fence” is set to travel to seven major cities throughout the United States this year, highlighting 272 artists and reaching over 4 million individuals annually. The chance to participate in this exhibit attracts photographers from around the world, providing these artists with a public platform and the opportunity to reach a large and diverse audience. “’The Fence’ is a gift to the community,” said Claire Rosen, an artist whose work “The Fantastical Feasts” is featured in “The Fence.” “For artists, the exposure is incredible, and it is very inspiring to be included amongst so much talent. For the general public, it is wonderful and unexpected to have contemporary artwork be so accessible. I love that my work is seen by such a diverse cross-section of people.” Although “The Fence” attracts many seasoned professionals, photographers of all levels are encouraged to submit their work. All submissions by artists living in and around the Triangle region will be judged and put into consideration for regional perks, such as inclusion in projection events, invitations to panel discussions and exposure to top local photography industry professionals. “The Fence” opened Aug. 18 and will remain viewable through Nov. 30 at Orange Street Mall in Durham.

“If you want to know more about photography, Click! has got it in spades,” said Lori Vrba, a Chapel Hill artist and one of the festival’s chief coordinators. “There’s hardly a day in October that doesn’t have something going on. Pick a few events early in the month that intrigue you, and I suspect that you’ll be inspired to do more.” Along with “The Fence,” the Click! Photography Festival plans to present “Click! 120” Oct. 4–8, an intense five-day experience featuring lectures, keynote addresses, portfolio reviews, workshops, art bus tours, panel discussions, artist talks and gallery and museum openings. Filmmaker and photographer Louie Palu will host a series of workshops during this event. Boasting 25 years of experience as a documentary photographer, Palu has mentored some of the world’s most recognizable photo editors and is best known for his 12-year-long project titled “Cage Call: Life and Death in the Hard Rock Mining Belt.” During these workshops, Palu will provide in-depth lessons on long-form editing, sequencing for books and exhibits and fieldwork techniques. In addition, author Peter Krogh will host a seminar on rapid high-quality digitalization. Peter Krogh has researched and written about camera digitalization techniques and has set up digitalization systems at the National Archives, the Library of Congress and several private collections. In this seminar, he will explain how the employment of such techniques allows for the rapid and complete digitization of prints, transparencies, negatives and other documents. There will also be a two-part series of seminars on professional development hosted by author, educator and advisor Mary Virginia Swanson. Throughout her career, Swanson has worked in the areas of documentary, photojournalism, fine art and licensing and has become a respected mentor, helping many artists navigate the ever-evolving photography industry. Anne Wilkes Tucker, curator emerita of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, will present a keynote address. Over the course of her career, Tucker has curated over 40 exhibitions and has contributed to over 150 magazines, books, and catalogues. Her many honors include being presented with the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1983 and being named “America’s Best Curator” by Time Magazine in 2001. Photographer Mathew Brandt, who describes his method as “a little bit messy and experimental,” will also give a keynote address on the use of traditional 19th century techniques to produce large-scale photographs. Finally, the Click! Photography Festival will be offering public portfolio reviews, during which participants are given the opportunity to present their portfolios to collectors, gallerists and curators for review and constructive critique. “The portfolio review is like speed dating for the artists,” said Vrba. “The artists walk in and have 30 minutes, one-on-one, to present their work and get feedback. It’s a way the working artists can show their portfolio to a large number of the significant players of fine photography in a short amount of time and all in one place.”

INDY: VISUAL ART AND ARTISTS

Art Preview: Step Inside Georges Rousse's Illusionistic Installations Before They Turn Into Photographs

Posted by Chris Vitiello on Fri, Oct 28, 2016 at 12:56 PM

Over the last week and a half, in a Durham warehouse space, Georges Rousse has managed a team of community members through many hours of painstaking art labor to produce a pair of illusionistic installations. On Saturday, the French artist will stand behind a camera and photograph them. And then, after the shutters click, the installations will be dead to him.

On Saturday night, as part of the Click! Triangle Photography Festival, the Durham Fruit & Produce Company opens for a public viewing of Rousse’s blue room and his “dream” room, even though they’re not really the works that Rousse claims as his. He's after photographs, and these two transformed spaces, interesting as they are, are a means to that end.

Saturday’s event at the Fruit also offers documentaries and a pop-up show of work by South African artist Zanele Muholi, who’s been in residence at Cassilhaus, in collaboration with Lerato Dumse, Lindeka Qampi, and Thembela "Terra" Dick. In addition to the Saturday-night Rousse viewing, which will be followed by a Click! closing party at Ponysaurus, the installations will be open for additional viewings on Thursday and Friday, Nov. 3 and 4 from 5–7 p.m., and on Saturday and Sunday, Nov. 5 and 6, from noon through 6 p.m. Despite Rousse’s ambivalence about these pieces as installations, they’re terrific to see in person, like getting to sit backstage during a play, or having a magician let you see how he or she does the tricks. Tromp l’oeil on a large scale, they mess a bit with your vision in a way that a photograph might not be able to anymore, now that most of us have the means to pull off comparable illusionistic image manipulations via the apps on our phones. At the least, seeing the space in person makes Rousse’s photos that much better. In the blue room, Rousse has positioned a camera at one end and then had his team of community members paint the other end blue in several stages. First, the perimeter of the camera’s visual field was blued-out to leave a perfect white square in the middle, which he photographed. The white square was then filled in with a paler blue for the final photograph. Every surface in the room received paint, not just the walls but the ceiling and floor as well as the furniture, light fixtures, light switches—everything. As the team was painting, Rousse would step behind the camera to get the single-point perspective he was going for, and then give instructions to his painters to correct divergent points in the image by straightening a line on the wall or building a drywall baffle to block some window light. The “dream” installation is even more elaborate than the blue room. Volunteers painted out the images in hundreds upon hundreds of sheets of newspapers, rendering the journalistic photographs into black rectangles. Then, they wallpapered one corner of a room opposite a camera’s position. Lastly, the letters of the word “dream” were painted onto the newspapers so that they appear to the camera's eye to hover in the space. Both installations have an unresolvable depth and dimensionality that causes them to shake a bit to the eye, like how the famous duck-rabbit optical illusion flicks back and forth between duck and rabbit in one’s consciousness even as the image remains static. This is pleasurable to see, especially on the scale at which Rousse works, and getting to stand in the middle of it to really fill your eyes with it is a remarkable optical experience.

This isn’t Rousse’s first visit to Durham. When the artist visited a decade ago, the city had many more undeveloped properties in which to put comparable installations, including the Chesterfield building of the vacant Liggett & Myers cigarette factory on West Main Street, the Bargain Furniture building on East Chapel Hill Street downtown, and the Liberty Warehouse located between Rigsbee and Foster streets (replaced now by a condominium complex under construction). That visit was a potent injection of contemporary art on a scale that Durham simply hadn’t seen at that time. Optics aside, the meaning and message of Rousse’s installations are open to interpretation. The blue room seems a straightforward take on the opportunity that the architecture and light of that specific room offered the artist. When asked, “Why blue?” Rousse responded with a kind of shrug—it was an intuitive choice, no more complex than his sense that blue would look good in that room with that light. He mentioned green, for instance, and made a face like he had bitten a lemon. While it has as much for the eye as the blue room does, the “dream” installation has plenty for the mind, too. In one way, the dream installation re-appropriates representation itself. By obliterating all the images in the newspapers in order to make a single image himself, Rousse has taken back photography and purified the act and value of image-making. The problematized dimensionality of the “dream” room forces a viewer to marry thought with look and prompts questions like “How did he do that?” Viewers will be stepping back and forth in the room, breaking and re-forming the letters of the word “dream.” There’s a politics in this. Rousse wants to awaken your engagement with the space through an optical trick. That he’s perfectly willing to show you his hands as he does the trick should make for an interesting Saturday night.

Click Bait, Walter Magazine

Triangle Now Spotlight: Click! Photography Festival

by Katherine Poole

Gov. Roy Cooper has officially proclaimed October Photography Month in North Carolina, and the Click! Photography Festival is your chance to observe it. Click! will put on more than 80 exhibits, events, and workshops featuring renowned and up-and-coming photographers at 35 local museums, galleries, universities, and alternative art spaces. Don’t miss exhibits like The Fence, the world’s largest public art photography exhibit, on show at Durham’s Orange Street Mall, or Garmsir Marines at the historic Forest Theatre on UNC-Chapel Hill’s campus: The stirring collection by Louie Palu, a Guggenheim Fellow and documentary photographer, features large-scale banner portraits. Other exhibits will take place at Raleigh’s Gregg Museum of Art & Design, the 21c Museum Hotel in Durham, the Holly Springs Cultural Center, and others.

But Click! is more than an opportunity to admire great photography. The festival also wants you behind the camera. Click! 120 Core Programming, an 120-hour intensive immersion into the medium of photography featuring keynote speakers, portfolio reviews, art bus tours, artist talks, and workshops, runs Oct. 4 – 8. Keynoters include Louie Palu and Anne Wilkes Tucker, curator emerita of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The festival concludes with an opportunity to operate the Mythical Beast, a 20-by-24-inch giant Polaroid camera on loan from 20Å~24 Studio making its final appearance to the public. Chuck Close, William Wegman, Andy Warhol, Joyce Tennyson, and Julien Schnabel have all taken turns behind the behemoth – at Click! you can too. The camera will be open to the public at Raleigh’s Anchorlight studios Oct. 27 and 28 in two-hour blocks of time (registration required) at a cost of $600.

Get with the picture and celebrate photography month. Governor’s orders.

CLICK! PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL 2017

Oct o b e r 1 8 , 201 7 / Kat K i e r nan

Wonderful things are happening in photography down south in the Carolinas. I recently flew to Durham, North Carolina to attend Click! Photography Festival (which is still going on) and review portfolios. The festival is ten years old and has hit its stride in the last couple of years, attracting reviewers from some of the best galleries, publications, and museums in the country. This in turn attracts many talented photographers, some of whom I am highlighting here.

CLICK PHOTO FESTIVAL IN NORTH CAROLINA

By Aline Smithson July 31, 2017

I recently received an invitation to attend the Click Photo Festival in Durham, North Carolina to review portfolios. Without hesitation, I said yes to the opportunity, not only to soak in Southern hospitality and see wonderful friends (can’t wait, Alexa Dilworth!), but to experience this multi-faceted platform to celebrate all things photography. The organizers state: “The CLICK! Photography Festival celebrates the medium of photography and its cultural influence by engaging the (North Carolina) Triangle community with exceptional photo-based works and artists. The month-long festival in October brings together exhibitions and programming while fostering dialogue between photographers and community members, all in hopes of inspiring artistic excellence, supporting professional development and promoting community engagement.”Check out the article here.