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June Issue 2007
City of North Charleston Features Works by Rob McDonald
Nearly 40 photographs by Virginia photographer Rob McDonald are on display at North Charleston's City Gallery, adjacent to the Charleston Area Convention Center, in North Charleston, SC, from June 1-30, 2007.
Born in Marion, SC, and a graduate of Winthrop, McDonald lived in both Tennessee and Texas before settling, for the past fifteen years, in Lexington, VA, where he is a professor of English and associate dean at Virginia Military Institute.
An admirer of literary greats like Eudora Welty, Allen Tate, William Faulkner, and Erskine Caldwell, McDonald likens his use of the camera to Southern writers' attempts to express the ways that place influences and even shapes identity. He calls his photographs "meditations" on the primary subject he has studied academically for twenty years: the American South.
Selected from a portfolio in his ongoing Southern
Places series, the works currently on display at the City
Gallery depict handmade birdhouses that McDonald has found on
his travels across the region. "They seem to me avian equivalents
of the vernacular architecture found along backroads," McDonald
says. "Once I started noticing them, I began to see them
everywhere - and not to speak too generally, the more modest the
human home, the more distinctive and extraordinary the birdhouses.
As I worked with the images in the darkroom, they began to seem
perfectly metaphorical."
While many consider photography a documentary medium, McDonald
has always been more interested its expressive capabilities. "I
confess that I have grown less and less interested in whatever
'reality' the lens may have recorded precisely," he has said.
"I am not creating a scientist's catalogue. What I am trying
to do is develop an impression, a suggestion of associations and
meanings that transcend the details of the negative."
McDonald's preference for unconventional cameras and insistence on hand-printing and toning each photograph result in strongly personal, contemplative images.
Self-taught as a photographer, McDonald has published and exhibited his work nationally in group and solo shows. A limited-edition, fine press book featuring 22 of the birdhouse photographs will be published later this month by Horse & Buggy Press in Durham, NC.
For more information check our SC Institutional Gallery listings, call the gallery at 843/745-1087 or visit (www.northcharleston.org).
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