Savannah Arts Academy’s 6th annual Junk 2 Funk Fashion Show was presented last weekend to three sellout crowds in the school’s lovely old theater. I’ve been attending and photographing the show for a few years now, and I can’t even begin to say how impressed I am by the efforts — the creativity, the energy, the good will, the coordination, the staging, the lighting, the sound — of SAA students, faculty, staff, volunteers, parents, and whoever else had a hand in the work.
This year there was an added wrinkle to Junk 2 Funk. Because of the threat of icy weather, the local public schools were faced with potentially nasty weather by afternoon on Tuesday, and the entire system was closed on Wednesday and Thursday. In other words, right at crunch time for student designers, models, and tech crew, they couldn’t even rehearse!
I attended the Saturday matinee show, and I didn’t really see or hear a glitch in the pacing, the lighting, the fashion, the models’ walks and timing. So much poise, so much talent.
If you get a chance to attend any of the SAA productions throughout the year, I really can’t recommend them highly enough.
Thanks to Kinte Taylor, Gif Lockley, and others, I manage to get press access. (For the record, I made a $10 donation when I picked up my press pass.) So I took a lot of photos.
In this post, I have a couple dozen of the ones that I liked best. I don’t know any of the students in these shots, by the way — they just seemed like the best photos. Sometime on Tuesday, I will post a much larger album of photos to Facebook.
You can obviously see this year’s theme “The Forces of Nature” reflected in the fashion.
Some of the lighting conditions got a little “hot” for the equipment and settings that I was using, so some of the whiter clothes didn’t photograph as well for me as some with more vibrant and darker colors.
And since I had some of my photos used without permission last week by The Weather Channel — click here to read about that and click here for an interesting discussion on the Savannah Unplugged Facebook page — I have decided to be very clear about how these photos should be used by others.
If you see a photo here that you want to post to your Facebook page or somewhere else, you have a couple of options: a) hit me up on Facebook (either Bill Dawers or via message to the Savannah Unplugged Facebook page or to my email billdawers@comcast.net), and I will respond by giving you the rights to use it for any noncommercial purposes, or b) give me a day to post the image to Facebook, and then you can tag and share the pic directly from the Savannah Unplugged Facebook page. Photographers don’t surrender ownership of images when they post them to Facebook, but using the service is a clear acknowledgement on the photographer’s part that other users will be able to share, comment, tag, etc.
If you want a much higher res version of any of these photos or any that I will post to Facebook on Tuesday, I am happy to send bigger files, time permitting.
By the way, I got decent shots of most — but certainly not all — of the looks in Junk 2 Funk this year. There were lots of other photographers at the shows, of course, so no worries there, I hope.
So here are just a couple dozen shots of the event, which finished with a wonderful dance featuring this year’s senior dance majors and some really nice moments as the designers took bows.
