Copious Notes

"Unicoi County" by Mike Smith. It will be featured in an exhibit of his work at the Art Museum at the University of Kentucky.

Mike Smith was on a Tuesday morning mission to show a friend some peacocks on a farm along East Tennessee’s Holston River.

He also knew he had a photo opportunity.

“I’d been there before and I knew it was gorgeous,” Smith said, less than an hour after the visit. “And I was right. There was fog coming off the river this morning with sunlight poking through.”

It was a moment that showed the East Tennessee State ­University photography professor’s enduring love for the landscape surrounding him, and a more directed way of working.

"Blountville, TN"

“I used to just drive slowly on the back roads around here, when I first came to Tennessee,” said Smith, who moved to Johnson City in 1981. “Now, I usually have a destination in mind.”

As part of the ­Robert C. May Photography ­Endowment Lecture Series, Smith will be in Lexington on Friday to talk about his work in conjunction with an exhibit of his photos in The Art Museum at the ­University of Kentucky.

Smith’s photos show a distinctly rural landscape, slowly changing with suburban development and businesses.

“You see new development adjacent to old farmlands,” he said. “I parallel familiar, ordinary stuff with things like gas stations and material more corporate in nature.”

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"Milkless" (2004) -- Jahi Chikwendiu encountered this young mother in the Ouri Cassoni refugee camp just outside Baha'i, Chad. He recalls: "She's holding this baby under her veil. And through the veil, I can see the silhouette of her nursing the baby. So, I took a lot of photos before I approached her. But I'm sure she saw me taking pictures, she just went about her business. Then, when I finally approached her, she started to talk about her and her baby and nursing. That's when she tells me that she's nursing but she has no milk. And she thinks that she doesn't have any milk because of the trauma she experienced. Having her whole village bombed in the middle of the night. And having so many people killed in front of her face and having to scatter from her village." Descriptions and images courtesy of The Art Museum at the University of Kentucky. All images copyright The Washington Post.

I know I am not the only person at the Lexington Herald-Leader who knew Jahi Chikwendiu was a remarkable talent the moment I met him. So his award winning career at The Washington Post comes as no surprise, nor does the decision of the Art Museum at the University of Kentucky to show Jahi’s work as part of the prestigious Robert C. May Photography Endowment Lecture Series. To preview his exhibit, I caught up with Jahi earlier this week before he started a busy day on the job for the Post.

Click the play button to hear our podcast with Jahi Chikwendiu:

Copious Notes podcasts are available on iTunes.

Here are a few more images from the exhibit.

"Sally Sami, a blogger who left her home country of Egypt (reflected)" (2007) -- Digital print Courtesy of the artist and The Washington Post In Egypt, there are growing restrictions on bloggers who receive threats of arrest for expressing and publishing what are considered anti-government and/or anti-Islam views. Another Egyptian blogger, Karim Amer, was jailed by an Egyptian court for four years for “insulting Islam.”

"Wall of Thorns" (2004) -- Hawa Oosman Adam rests in her temporary home of thorns and twigs where IDP's (internally displaced people) have made an impromptu camp on the outskirts of Nera, Sudan. Some families, including Hawa's, have had to move six times during the course of this 20-month-old conflict where African settlements are being attacked by the government with the help of militias known as the janjaweed.

"Darfur Sandstorm" (2004) -- On his first day in a vast refugee camp in Darfur, Chikwendiu was standing on a water truck at the edge of the camp to survey the scene when a dust storm rolled up. He recalls: "I started noticing people's attention go to an area behind the camp ... I didn't even know what it was. So maybe within a few minutes I figured I'd better get off of this truck. I take off running, and within seconds, wham! I just get hit by this wall of wind, and the sand is moving so hard that it's kind of slicing against you.I just remember looking for shelter. I saw these guys walking and I saw them jump in a tent. So I just jumped in the tent with them. They seemed OK with my being there, because we started giving each other the thumbs up.I was just sitting there waiting for ... hoping, praying that I wouldn't be impaled by something flying. So then, I got myself together. I had a few handkerchiefs that I wrapped around my camera and my face. I fashioned a camera hood out of my handkerchiefs. I started walking around, looking through my camera. Not even taking pictures. Because it was the only way that I could see. The sand was just slicing at my eyes. So, for a while after that, my vision was blurry where the sand had just scarred my eye lenses."

“Black Hawk Down” (2003) — Mourners at the Washington D.C. funeral of a soldier killed in a Black Hawk helicopter crash in Iraq.

Click here to read our story about Jahi.

Click here to see more of Jahi’s work at his website.

Scott and guest soloist Evelyn Glennie head for the pre-concert chat in the President's Room in the Singletary Center for the Arts.

Photographer Matt Goins shot a lot more pictures of Scott Terrell preparing for his first masterclassics concert as the Lexington Philharmonic Orchestra’s music director than we could get in Saturday’s paper. But here at le blog, where we have unlimited space (the webmaster may beg to differ), Matt is letting us share a few more photos from last week’s exhilirating season opener.

A phew more Phil photos also pheels like a phun way to celebrate Copious Notes’ 1,500th post. (I just toasted the occasion with a Carmilla at Coffea. Woo-hoo.)

Terrell leads the pre-show chat.

Terrell and Glennie take some questions.

Terrell straightens his tie.

Terrell goes over the score in his dressing room before taking the stage.

On the podium, in command of the orchestra.

More coverage:

• Loren Tice’s concert review.
• Coverage of opening night.
• Evelyn Glennie travels light.
• Terrell ready to go.

The installation of "Honoring America's Coal Miners" at Georgetown College's Cochenour Gallery. Photos by Thorney Lieberman.

Thorney Lieberman spent years in New York trying to shoot architectural images of the city that replicated the experience of being in the presence of the actual objects.

“I had this idea if you looked out a 50- by 60-inch window, you should be able to replicate that experience of seeing what you see out of that window,” Lieberman says.

Coy and Carrisa is one of the images in Lieberman's exhibit.

But it never quite worked. “I never quite conquered the scale of New York ­architecture,” Lieberman says.

But he has with coal ­miners, and that is the major point of his exhibit, Honoring America’s Coal Miners, which is at Georgetown College’s Cochenour Gallery through Oct. 7.

By creating life-size, ­detailed portraits of miners, Lieberman wants to put a human face on coal ­mining, which he thinks is often ­written off as a faceless industry.

Lieberman has come to ­regard the miners as ­“American heroes, engaged in dangerous work to supply us with energy,” he says in his artist’s statement.

The project began ­after ­Lieberman moved to ­Charleston, W.Va., where his wife, Anne, grew up. They were just settling into the Mountain State when the Sago Mine disaster of Jan. 2, 2006, took the lives of 12 miners.

The event garnered national media attention for days, and Lieberman became aware, “This was the reality of West Virginia, and this was my community.”

While living in Colorado, Lieberman had worked on a project creating life-size, sharply detailed portraits of Native Americans, and he ­decided he wanted to do something similar with ­miners. He went to the United Mine Workers office around the corner from his home to start looking for people ­willing to pose for him.

For Lieberman’s style of photography, posing is not a small request.
His life-size portraits are created from separate images shot on 8- by 10-inch film. For instance, Coy and Carrisa, a portrait of a miner and his daughter, is made up of 34 separate images.

Lieberman’s camera is mounted on a 10-foot-tall frame that he moves down and across the subject’s body to photograph each part in 1-to-1 scale. That requires the subject to stand relatively still for 15 ­minutes, hit repeatedly with a flash that is “brighter than the sun,” Lieberman says.

And we’re not talking models here. These were coal miners, right after work.

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