Portraits of Places: Contemporary Landscape Photography is on display now through December 29 in the Georgine Clarke Alabama Artists Gallery.

The exhibiting artists are Chuck Hemard, Devin Lunsford, Wayne Sides, Jerry Siegel, and Sonja Rieger.

Chuck Hemard (Auburn) is a lifelong resident of the American South. His recent photographs, made mostly with large format film cameras, explore the complexities of contemporary landscape. In 2018, Hemard published a monograph with Daylight Books that explores remnants of old-growth longleaf pinelands across the Deep South. The work has been featured in Smithsonian Magazine (online), Hyperallergic, and Garden and Gun Magazine (online). In 2014, he was awarded an Artist Fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts and has work included in public collections across the southeast United States, including the Columbus Museum of Art in Columbus, GA, and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans. Recent solo exhibitions include Leland Gallery at Georgia College in Milledgeville, GA, and the Southeast Museum of Photography in Daytona Beach, FL. Hemard is an Associate Professor at Auburn University in the Department of Art and Art History.

Devin Lunsford (Chelsea) began studying photography intensely in his early 20s and over the past fifteen years has developed an instantly recognizable style, drawing on the regional work of photographers like William Christenberry and Walker Evans in his rapturously beautiful, frequently eerie images of mundanity and decay captured during his long drives around Alabama.

Wayne Sides (Florence) is a photographer and his series “The Mysterious Legend of Cypress Creek” depicts the imagined remains and mythology left by a previous civilization of the distant past that understood the complexities of design found in nature and that which is also still found in a contemporary “landscape.” Visually mixing the look of early photographic processes and presentation style with landscape images that have been composed in a more modern way, attempts to join both the earlier and modern civilizations with the basic shared experiences found within nature.

The visual presentation style was mainly inspired by the early photographic daguerreotype process, the lithography printing process and split toning printing methods. The birchwood carved mats with gold details were replicated from a presentation style used the mid-1850s. The overall visual intent was to create something that exhibits early photographic characteristics with the “textures” of the printing process. At first glance they appear as photographic landscape studies of nature, but the viewer then realizes it’s a modern interpretation of a natural environment after studying the image more closely. The images represent an imagined portal to the past, that is still present in nature but possibly just hidden away.

Jerry Siegel (Selma) is renowned for his intimate portraits, many of which are featured in his monograph Facing South: Portraits of Southern Artists (2011). In 2009, he received the first Artadia Awards Grand Prize in Atlanta. Siegel’s work is included in the collections of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; the Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL; and the Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, NC, among others.

Sonja Rieger (Birmingham) received her MFA from Rutgers University, her BA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and became a Professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 1979. In addition, she served as Chair of the Department of Art and Art History. She has exhibited widely at regional and national venues, most recently a portfolio of prints were acquired by the Centro de Arte Alcobendes in Madrid, she has exhibited at Carmen Wiedenhoeft Gallery in Denver, CO, during Denver's month of photography and at; the Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans, LA; the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston Salem, NC; the Ogden Museum in New Orleans, LA; and the National Museum for Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. Other exhibitions of note are at the A.I.R. Gallery, White Columns and the Sherry French Gallery, in New York; at the Jones Troyer Fitzpatrick Gallery, and the Martin Gallery in Washington D.C., at the Fotogalerie Bordenau in Frankfurt, Germany; and in Hitachi, Ibaragiken Japan. Her work is in the collections of the the Centro de Arte Alcobendes, Madrid, the 21st Century Hotel Museum, International Polaroid Corporation, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the Birmingham Museum of Art, the Huntsville Museum of Art, and other corporate and private collections. Recipient of two Individual Artist Grants from the Alabama State Council on the Arts, Rieger has also received grants for projects from the Polaroid Corporation, the Southern Arts Federation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is represented by Maus Contemporary in Birmingham, AL.

Free and open to the public Monday – Friday from 8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. Visit us on the first floor of the RSA Tower, located in downtown Montgomery at 201 Monroe Street, Suite 110.

Please note that the gallery will be closed the following days in observance of state holidays: November 23 & 24; December 25.

For more information, please contact Gallery Manager Amy Jenkins at 334-242-5150 or amy@arts.alabama.gov.