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.

Savannah itself is an important player in Why I Walk, but the thrust of the text is more universal. The principles and examples could be applied in some way by people who live across America and around the world.

I should note that, before he became SDRA director, Kevin also wrote a wildly popular Savannah Unplugged post that later appeared as an op-ed in the Savannah Morning News: Savannah as a model for the nation: not 1733, but today.

In an SMN column today — Why Savannahians should care about walking — Klinkenberg puts Savannah’s walkability into a broader context. A snippet:

Walking is not a fringe benefit of being in Savannah. It is essential. In this city, you can experience other human beings by greeting them in reality, not just through a car window. Anyone can be here and enjoy a slower pace of life that includes sitting on picturesque streets and shaded public spaces. This place speaks to some very human desires that are timeless, and consistent across every culture.

The fact that Savannah was built around walking for 200 years is also why it is so attractive. When you experience a place by walking, the little details and the appearance of every building matters more. When you speed through a town at 60 mph, you rarely notice much beyond the signs.

I write this because it seems that sometimes we forget just how important walking is to the current and future health of our city.

Kevin doesn’t delve into specific examples, but it’s interesting that this piece has been published as the city of Savannah is about to conduct a misguided “experiment” that will make Bay Street less walkable. For the month of September, we’re going to remove over 100 on-street parking spaces on the south side of Bay Street — spaces that generate millions of dollars for nearby businesses annually — so that travel lanes can be widened in the hope that sideswipe auto collisions can be reduced. In the process, we’ll have speeding traffic just a few feet from the sidewalk on the south side of Bay Street from MLK to East Broad.

Click here for my recent City Talk column detailing all the negative fallout that we’ll see from that experiment.

Ironically, this experiment is in part the end result of Mayor Eddie DeLoach’s expression of concerns about traffic traveling too fast on Bay and the unpleasantness of being on the sidewalk near City Hall. With wider lanes and less on-street parking, we’ll have even faster traffic on Bay and even more unpleasant conditions for pedestrians, in addition to the massive damage done to nearby small businesses and property values.

Yes, we might reduce sideswipe accidents with wider lanes, but we’ll raise the odds of truly catastrophic crashes.

More recently, city officials announced that they might also add a truck ban to Bay Street in the evening until very early morning. That’s worth trying, I think, but I’d invite city officials and members of city council to stand beside Bay Street on a typical weeknight, when traffic really isn’t heavy at all. Some drivers are going far in excess of the speed limit, and a relatively small number of those vehicles are large trucks. With wider lanes, no trucks at all in the evening, and no on-street parking, some of those light vehicle drivers will go even faster.

One important point: a couple days ago, John Bennett of the Savannah Bicycle Campaign told the SMN that the September experiment could result in a “false positive” involving vehicle speeds. In other words, since the temporary medians will be marked with a sea of orange traffic barrels, we will see some drivers automatically slow down. If we had permanent medians there, those drivers would not slow down.

What a mess. Clearly, the city of Savannah needs more people on staff who can advocate clearly and effectively for pedestrians and for small businesses.

Beyond the immediate issue of Bay Street, Kevin’s piece about Savannah’s walking brand is worth keeping in mind for a variety of other reasons. For example, incredibly, there isn’t a signalized crosswalk on either the east or west side of Forsyth Park between Gaston Street and Park Avenue. That’s about 3/8ths of a mile. On MLK south of Gwinnett, we’ve got a median that prevents many pedestrians with limited mobility from crossing the street for blocks at a stretch. I could go on and on with examples.

Yes, Savannah’s older neighborhoods are dramatically more walkable than many places in America, and Savannah’s downtown area remains breathtakingly beautiful in many places, but those qualities exist because of good planning in the relatively distant past. We need to make sure that we make decisions right now that reinforce the visionary planning in Savannah’s history.

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:

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.

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”