By Holly Stuart Hughes

Jason Houston, photo editor at Orion, the non-profit environmental magazine, reviewed the work of Jessica Ingram on the first morning of the two-day portfolio reviews at PhotoNOLA in December. He knew right away, he says, that "her project ‘A Civil Rights Memorial’ was one of the strongest bodies of work I was going to see all weekend." In fact, Ingram won this year's PhotoNOLA Review Prize. She will receive a $1,000 cash prize and a solo exhibition during next year's PhotoNOLA.

Ingram, who was raised in Tennessee, has been working with historians, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the FBI, to research and document where Civil Rights-era atrocities occur. For example, Houston notes, Ingram "visited the store where Emmett Till was accused of whistling at a white woman. And she also documented less historically high-profile places such as a nondescript national forest in Mississippi popular because of its remoteness as a site for race related murders." For portfolio reviews, Ingram printed the images on heavy stock; each image appears with text explaining what happened on the site, when, who the victims and perpetrators were, and what has happened to them since. (View the slide show to read Ingram's text.)

Houston says Ingram's landscapes stand out from what he calls "the overdone ‘Americana’ type series" that are often seen at portfolio reviews and "usually, fatally, followed by some lofty art speak statement about exploring man’s inhumanity to man where those who have more impose on those who have less the artless architecture of blind consumption and its soul sapping perpetual cycles of cheap production and thoughtless waste, all, of course, in contrast with the resilience of nature."

Ingram's low key images are not an exposé, he says. "They leave us staring nowhere else but inside ourselves."

Houston says, "What impacted me the most as I sat across the table from her, what actually changed me (which is what good art should do), is that she calls out our own responsibilities to these events." He goes on to explain, "We see the images first for their nothingness, only to read the captions and have our passivity plainly and unapologetically thrown back in our faces. She shows us how we as a culture don’t seem to really care. But she also suggests that when we can’t turn away, when the extraordinarily horrible stories are inserted back into our everyday experiences, we still have the capacity cry. She reminds us that even if we don’t see it, bigotry, racism, hatred, and perhaps worst of all, man’s inhumanity to man perpetrated through forgetfulness and apathy, is still all around us. We just need to take the time to stop, pay attention, learn a little, and most importantly, to remember."


Houston says he flies to "as many portfolio reviews and collaborative photography events each year as my carbon footprint tolerance will allow."  Orion magazine is "committed to being a forum for creative contributors and their stories that may not fit as well into commercial media." Portfolio reviews and other opportunities to meet with contributors and new photographers "have become an essential part of our editorial thought and acquisitions process."

He says Ingram's project may not be a perfect fit for Orion's environmental mission, but he hopes to find a place for it as "a strong editorial statement." He didn't advise Ingram to try to place it in a gallery, but he sees it "as something that would work great as a public exhibition, possibly in collaboration with a non-profit or the like that deals with all these issues. It would also be powerful as a book but again less of an art monograph and more a cross over advocacy project."

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