JACK SPENCER
Born in Kosciusko, Mississippi in 1951 and raised in Louisiana, Spencer is a self-taught photographer. He is known for his photographs of the humid bayou country, hard living black musicians, dogs, and just plain folk going about their business in the backwaters of the Mississippi River Delta. They are the subject of his first book, Native Soil, (Louisiana State U. Press, 1999). Traveling farther south to Mexico, Spencer worked for three years on a series of over seventy-five images of people and landscapes filled with magical realism. A book of this work, Apariciones, is forthcoming. Spencer's newest project is a series of landscapes from various parts of the United States simply called, This Land. Spencer has said of his work, "Photographically I approach my work in an expressionistic way. I am not documentary in any traditional sense. In fact, I steer away from that form. I am, however documenting . . . in my own subjective way, history and viewpoint." His photographs have been exhibited in galleries throughout the country, acquired by museum and corporate collections in the United States and abroad, and published in Photo Metro, Oxford American, and American Way magazines. Spencer now lives in Nashville, Tennessee.
SOURCE Native Soil by Jack Spencer (Louisiana State University Press, 1999) and Andrew Smith www.andrewsmithgallery.com
PHOTO Jack Spencer by Bill Wittliff, 1999 from the Tragaluz series