Light of the Spirit: Portraits of Southern Outsider Artists

Gathering twenty-one widely known Southern artists from four Southern states, photographer Karekin Goekjian has captured the vital human connections between the creator and the object. Working with moonlight, twilight, or a touch of flash, Goekjian photographs each artist and his art in the settings where that creative work occurs―the yards, work sheds, and woods of Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and North Carolina. "Goekjian’s photographic art has an intensity that holds its own with self-taught art,” says art critic and writer Donald Kuspit. “His photographs have the same aura of direct yet enigmatic statement, conveying the same sense of urgent abstraction and moral emergency.” From Alabama, Goekjian photographed Thornton Dial Sr., Lonnie Holley, Ronald Lockett, W. C. Rice, Jimmy Lee Suddeth, and Mose Tolliver. From Georgia, he photographed Howard Finster, Dilmus Hall, Peter Loose, R. A. Miller, Harold Rittenberry Jr., Reverend John D. Ruth, and Willie Tarver. Mississippi artists included are Burgess Dulaney, A. J. Mohammed, Sulton Rogers, and Earl Simmons. And North Carolinians photographed are Benny Carter, James Harold Jennings, Clyde Jones, and Vollis Simpson. Goekjian’s extraordinarily vivid portraits of them in their special environments seem as natural as the clay, metal, wood, and paint these artists use. In a sense Goekjian paints with light. Each portrait produces a surreal effect that parts the curtain on the individual artist’s special world and achieves a rare empathy with the subject matter. Drawing on the raw, earthy spirit that infuses these paintings and sculptures, Goekjian creates photos that are works of art in themselves. Read more