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.

Hard work. Dedication. Art. Fashion. Dance. Beauty. Energy. Youth. Sustainable reuse of castoff materials. Education. Public education.

Savannahians who appreciate any of those things need to do themselves a favor and plan to attend the 2014 Junk 2 Funk Fashion Show at the Savannah Arts Academy.

As I noted in a post last May, SAA was named the best public high school in Georgia by U.S. News & World Report. I’ve written posted fairly often about the school’s programs and events, including a recap of the Junk 2 Funk Fashion Show in 2011.

The 5th annual Junk 2 Funk packed the John A. Varnedoe Theater at the Savannah Arts Academy three times over the weekend for a multimedia extravaganza created from the combined work of students from a variety of the arts magnet’s programs.

You can learn a lot more at the SAA website and Facebook page. The school’s visual arts department, chaired by Trellis Payne, takes center stage for Junk 2 Funk, but many other departments are also involved. Savannah Magazine was a major sponsor this year.

The fast-paced show employed a theme of “The Seven Seas” and took the audience around the world. An opening dance number with a young tourist couple being accosted by fantasy figures moved seamlessly into the fashion show, which featured the work of 22 student designers who turned unconventional and found materials into clothes, which were modeled boldly by fellow students. As the runway show ended, the dancers returned, only to be followed by recognition of the designers, and then bows from the rest of the cast and crew.

I’ve limited this album to the best of the photographs I took. I wish I had gotten good shots of all the fashions and of all the participants, but I couldn’t and didn’t. I’ll post a bigger album to Facebook sometime in the coming days, but these were the shots that struck me. My apologies to the many students who aren’t pictured here.

And it’s likely pictures of others will turn up elsewhere. Click here for a piece in today’s Savannah Morning News that includes both photos and video. Mangue Banzima has already posted some great backstage photos on his Qui Style in Savannah blog. Photographer Christina M. Bunn has already posted some great shots too. If you see additional links of interest, please add them in the comments if I haven’t added them already.

And now what you were no doubt looking for, a few pics (click for larger versions or open the gallery using CoolIris):

Tickets are now on sale online at Seat Yourself.

Last May, the Savannah Arts Academy — a magnet school that’s part of the local public system — was named the top public high school in the state by U.S. News and World Report.

That’s pretty remarkable on many levels. It’s especially interesting given the fact that, even being here in the sports-crazed South, SAA has neither basketball nor football teams.

The Junk 2 Funk Fashion Show is pretty much what it sounds like. Student designers take reclaimed and recycled materials — junk — and turn them into fashion.

I had just been running this blog for a few weeks when I posted about the 2011 show. The response to that post was one of the first clear indications that there was a demand for what I hoped to do with this site. That original post has gotten almost 900 page views and continues to get periodic hits, probably because photographer Bryan Stovall graciously allowed me to use some of his photos from that show.

A student designer takes a bow with his models at the 2011 Junk 2 Funk - Photo by Bryan Stovall

A highly recommended community event, but I suggest buying tickets right away. The two evening performances are virtually certain to sell out and the Saturday matinee just might do so too.