I’ve been shooting photos at Junk 2 Funk for a number of years, and I am always impressed by the sheer warmth and joy of the event. It’s inspiring to see to many creative teenagers working together and supporting each other.

This is just a sampling of the photos I took at the Saturday matinee show. If you want to see even more, there is a huge album on my Savannah Unplugged Facebook page. Many thanks to photographer teacher Kinte Taylor for reaching out to me every year.

I took some photos of the joyous affair.

Once again this year, I attended and photographed one of the three performances of the fast-paced, beautifully produced Junk 2 Funk Fashion Show, which is spearheaded by the visual arts department at the magnet high school. The fashions are made from ordinary “junk.” This year’s theme was “The Savannah Safari,” which obviously inspired some beautiful work.

I took a ton of photos, and I have included a few dozen of them in this post. Within the next couple of days, I’ll post all of these plus many more to the Savannah Unplugged Facebook page.

My house has only a narrow front porch — a larger porch on the west side of the house was demolished long before I moved in — but there’s still plenty of room to sit out there. I don’t sit out there, however. Some of the neighborhood’s residents — mostly black, mostly older — still sit on their porches a lot, but porches are no longer the civic meeting points that they once were.

So hats off to Emergent Savannah and Art Rise Savannah for the Artists of Social Change exhibition on four front porches on 39th Street on Sunday evening.

From the Facebook event description:

An icon of the Deep South that can be found at all latitudes, the front porch is a place to slow down, spend time together, and to cool off during the dog days of summer. As varied spaces of relaxation, surveillance, leisure and democratic discourse, front porches hold a unique place between the private world of home and family and the public world of civic and street life. In Starland, four front porches will become creative platforms to examine themes that are as essential to our communities as porches are to our homes: empathy, survival, pleasure and emancipation. By honoring activist histories and bringing new voices to the table, we will span past and present to consider how social change takes root.

I’m going to quibble a little with the use of the term “Starland” here. I was one of the first journalists to write about Starland, and I use the term routinely to describe the area immediately around the old Starland Dairy (still unrenovated btw) at Bull and 40th streets, but I don’t think the term sensibly applies to blocks east of Abercorn. The Thomas Square Streetcar Historic District has been a National Register Historic District since 1997, and the short version of that — Thomas Square — works just fine for me.

Curators Lisa Junkin Lopez and Stephanie Raines brought the following performers to the Artists of Social Change:

• House of Gunt
• Abeni Cultural Arts Performing Dance Center
• Martin Bell, PostCrunk
• Patt Gunn, Master Storyteller and Geechee Girl Productions

I bought a new lens last week, so I was experimenting some with my camera settings. I was happy with a lot of the photos, and I’m going to present these in chronological order, even though it means that the shots aren’t sorted logically. I think this presentation gives a clearer sense of what it was like to wander 39th Street on Sunday. Congrats to all involved.

And this is what 35th Street looked like while I was walking home:

For what it’s worth, and at the risk of oversimplifying some complex issues, I think a lot of the tension over the Black Lives Matter movement results from some Americans either innocently or willfully misconstruing the name as “Only Black Lives Matter” when the intent is something much closer to “Black Lives Matter Too.”

Anyway, I took a bunch of photos before, during, and after the vigil, and some of the beginning of the march to City Hall.

On Thursday night, Club One and three local performance groups — the Club One Cabaret, The House of Gunt, and The Savannah Sweet Tease Burlesque Revue — raised over $7,000 (including over $1000 just in tips to the performers) for Equality Florida’s Pulse Victims Fund. In some ways, it was an odd melding — the more traditional drag of the in-house cabaret, the anarchic camp of The House of Gunt, the throwback burlesque (and a little boilesque) of The Sweet Tease — but the performances revealed far more similarities than differences. I found the evening a celebration of living, an embrace of differences, an exploration of the fragility and beauty of our bodies. (While I was writing this, I got distracted rereading Susan Sontag’s Notes on Camp, which was published the same year I was born, but I’ll save those reflections for a future post.)

The audience was wonderfully diverse, which wasn’t really a surprise. The LGBTQ community in Savannah has never been big enough to fragment into discrete subgroups as it sometimes can in larger cities, and Club One has always rolled out the welcome mat. There was also a silent auction — I won a beautiful painting by Karen Abato — and the bar proceeds also went to the fund for victims. I took a lot of photos, and I didn’t want to wait too long to get a first post up. I’ll post these and dozens more in the next few days to the Savannah Unplugged Facebook page.

Enter State of the Art: Savannah Style at the Telfair Museums’ Jespon Center last Saturday evening.

Here’s how the Telfair described it:

Telfair is proud to showcase some of Savannahâ€s finest fashion designers—Brooke Atwood, Merline Labissiere, Tatiana Smith, and Meredith Sutton—as they join forces to create a stunning fashion show highlighting the contemporary styles of Savannah. In celebration of State of the Art, guests will have an opportunity to explore the exhibition, browse the designers†pop-up shops, and enjoy the fashion show.

Sponsored by Brooke Atwood Design, Merline Labissiere, Tatiana Smith, Meredith Anne Sutton, Rise Models, Ms. Quito Artistry, Sun Kiss Makeup and Hair, and Service Brewing Company.

You really can’t see the jewelry of Tatiana Smith and Meredith Sutton in the photos here, but those pieces fit beautifully with the clothing by Merline Labissiere and Brooke Atwood.

The models walked around a seated VIP area in the Jepson lobby before heading up the grand staircase. It made for dramatic visuals, even if the lack of a traditional runway prevented the kind of fashion photography you might expect.

And, hey, Bruce Weber showed up — he’s pictured below with his old friend and protege Doug Ordway, who runs RISE Models here in Savannah.

I met Bruce Weber 15 years ago when he shot an Abercrombie and Fitch catalog in Savannah. He obviously brought the talent with him, but I managed to introduce him to a local model that joined the shoot for a couple days. We met to discuss the terms at Weber’s home base for part of the shoot: the ballroom of the American Legion on Bull Street. It was my first time being in that building — this was before the lounge started welcoming the community — and now I’ve been there over a thousand times.

Weber has recently been working on a book that features some art by the late Savannahian Paul Stone. I’ll have more news about that as things develop.

Anyway, lots of shots here, and I’ll post these and more to the Savannah Unplugged Facebook page later today. I got decent photos of most of the looks, but not all.

First, the work of Merline and then Brooke:

Seriously, chicken shit bingo, The Sweet Thunder Strolling Band, a collection of local authors, paintings by Panhandle Slim, lots of people dressed in O’Connoresque costumes, a dog that refuses to accept that his owner is inside a gorilla suit — what more could one want on a glorious Sunday afternoon in the spring?

I take all sort of photos in dark nightclubs, but I’ll confess to being a little flummoxed by taking photos in bright sun and deep shade … Anyway, lots of photos here from the event.