Jack Spencer is a Nashville-based photographer, influenced by both the literature of the South and the great modernist painters of the 20th century.
“He’s inspired by Edward Hopper and even Mark Rothko – there’s a sense of otherness from Rothko that he captures in his work,” says Mark Scala, who’s curating Spencer’s first solo exhibition at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville. “And there’s an influence by Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner.”
Spencer is a native of Mississippi. His work gives off a sense of a deep, rich atmosphere – a dreamlike vision of something suspended in time and lingering beneath the surface.
Thus the show’s title: “Beneath the Surface.”
His early black & white work from the 1990s is darkroom photography that’s tinted or toned, its negatives distressed to appear older than they are. It’s about people and landscapes in the South, on the fringes of economic stability.
“They’re poor people we might drive past a hundred times without paying attention,” he says. “”It’s about looking where others don’t, and seeing the beauty, dignity and power of his subjects.”
Scala has selected 70 of Spencer’s photographs, including his color work of the past 10 years. It’s more about landscapes barely populated by people, and likely to include animals, forsaken buildings or structures.
“There’s the open emptiness of Edward Hopper,” he says of the self-taught photographer who began his career as a painter.
But the reality is that his work is reminiscent of two 20th-century photographers: Edward Steichen and Robert Frank.
“Early on, he was inspired by Steichen to hone his craft as a pictorialist, with a soft-focus blur into the background,” he says. “And then there’s Frank’s “The Americans,” and its gritty images across the country, along the highway and on the road.”
But mostly, Spencer’s photography is about the mystery of the medium, and straddling the border between the real and the imaginary.
The exhibition opens on July 12.
For more information, go to http://fristcenter.org/calendar-exhibitions/detail/jack-spencer
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