Click Bait

Click! Photography Festival

by Katherine Poole
photograph courtesy Click! Photography Festival

Gov. Roy Cooper has officially proclaimed October Photography Month in North Carolina, and the Click! Photography Festival is your chance to observe it. Click! will put on more than 80 exhibits, events, and workshops featuring renowned and up-and-coming photographers at 35 local museums, galleries, universities, and alternative art spaces.

Don’t miss exhibits like The Fence, the world’s largest public art photography exhibit, on show at Durham’s Orange Street Mall, or Garmsir Marines at the historic Forest Theatre on UNC-Chapel Hill’s campus: The stirring collection by Louie Palu, a Guggenheim Fellow and documentary photographer, features large-scale banner portraits. Other exhibits will take place at Raleigh’s Gregg Museum of Art & Design, the 21c Museum Hotel in Durham, the Holly Springs Cultural Center, and others.

But Click! is more than an opportunity to admire great photography. The festival also wants you behind the camera. Click! 120 Core Programming, an 120-hour intensive immersion into the medium of photography featuring keynote speakers, portfolio reviews, art bus tours, artist talks, and workshops, runs Oct. 4 – 8. Keynoters include Louie Palu and Anne Wilkes Tucker, curator emerita of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The festival concludes with an opportunity to operate the Mythical Beast, a 20-by-24-inch giant Polaroid camera on loan from 20×24 Studio making its final appearance to the public. Chuck Close, William Wegman, Andy Warhol, Joyce Tennyson, and Julien Schnabel have all taken turns behind the behemoth – at Click! you can too. The camera will be open to the public at Raleigh’s Anchorlight studios Oct. 27 and 28 in two-hour blocks of time (registration required) at a cost of $600.

Get with the picture and celebrate photography month. Governor’s orders.