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.

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.

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.

This year’s theme was “Intergalactic” and that set the stage for the trippy, intricate, even elegant designs by several dozen student designers whose work was shared by their classmate models.

I love going to Junk 2 Funk each year — it’s exciting to live a couple of miles from a public high school where the arts are so highly valued.

Last night was opening night, and I took a ton of photos. I’ll probably post one big gallery in a day or two to the Savannah Unplugged Facebook page. The photos here don’t necessarily represent my favorite designs of the night, but they’re some of the best shots that I got. The event and the students move quickly, and this year there was a fair amount of smoke, which always makes photography harder (especially near the end when the designers took their bows).

Anyway, more to come soon. Enjoy. (And if you want to share any of these photos, that’s cool with me, but please link back to this post. Thanks.)

Update:
Links to photos on this blog from previous years:
2015 Junk 2 Funk “Insectum”
2014 Junk 2 Funk “Forces of Nature”
2013 Junk 2 Funk “The Seven Seas”

hissing lawns is named in honor of Joni Mitchell, whose album The Hissing of Summer Lawns remains under-appreciated. (Much of her work is under-appreciated in a reductive way, I think, as evidenced by descriptions like “folk singer” that appeared in the press when her current health crisis made the news.)

I’m just one of about 8 or 9 active contributors to hissing lawns — and it feels great to have so many good writers and photographers who are so passionate about the local, regional, and national music scenes.

Of course, as a result of spending so much time editing hissing lawns, combined with some very difficult out-of-state family issues, I haven’t spent nearly as much time here at Savannah Unplugged as I used to. I plan to keep this blog going, however, and I’m hoping to put a lot more content here this summer and fall.

Given the interest generated by the Savannah Unplugged post about the time The Rolling Stones stayed in Savannah — almost exactly 50 years ago — I thought I’d reshare a small number of the photos of The Rolling Stones that I shot at Georgia Tech’s Bobby Dodd Stadium in Atlanta on June 9th.

Click here for more photos and a full review at hissing lawns. (And please consider liking the hissing lawns Facebook page.)

Again, that’s just a quick sample of the shots. Click here for more.