The Summer edition of The Main Street Rag, our quarterly literary magazine, features an interview with artist Bryce Lankard by Lynda C. Ward along with poetry, fiction, reviews, photographs along with shop talk and commentary by Managing Editor M. Scott Douglass from “The Back Seat” section.
Cover price is $8, $6 if ordered from the MSR Online Bookstore.
What’s Inside (Table of Contents)
Featured Interview:
Bryce Lankard: Art Unhinged by Lynda C. Ward
Fiction by:
Lauro Palomba
Simone Martel
Lockie Hunter
Eric Rawson
Poetry by:
Maggie Ammerman
Kaye Bartholomew
Judith Behar
Roy Bentley
Jesse Breite
Daniel Carpenter
Patricia Caspers-Ross
Bill Christophersen
Darren C. Demaree
Cynthia Schwartzberg Edlow
Kenneth Frost
Sean Ackerman
Timothy Geiger
Joan Payne Kincaid
Cleo Griffith
John Guzlowski
Alan Haider
Rene N. Hargrove
F. Dianne Harris
Jamie Lynn Heller
Justin Holliday
Mike James
Peter Leight
Arthur Powers
Linda Parsons Marion
Robert Manaster
Peter McNamara
Gregg Mosson
Lynn Pattison
Fred Pollack
David Romanda
David Radavich
William Reichard
Kayla Sargeson
Alessio Zanelli
Blue Pages (Reviews)
Books Reviewed: Transcendental Telemarketer by Beth Copeland, The Swamp Monster of Home by Catherine Carter, The Game of Boxes by Catherine Barnett, The Man Who Wouldn’t Stand Up by Jacob M. Appel, Ventrakl by Christian Hawkey, The Astronomer’s Pearl by George Young, Render by Collin Kelley.
Reviewers: Eric Weil, Jen Connell, Richard Allen Taylor, Mike James
Artwork:
Bryce Lankard: “Liberty on Claiborne” (cover), “Two Kids on a Car,” “Self-Portrait,” “Basin Street,” “Chartres Street,” “St. Roch Altar,” “Pigeon Man,” “Dalmation,” “Playground (China Lake).”
M. Scott Douglass: “Hollywood Sign,” “Surfer Dude & Motor/Hotel”
“I have long been a huge Walker Percy fan,” says documentary and fine art photographer Bryce Lankard with a charming Southern drawl.
Lankard and the famed Southern author, Percy, have much in common. Both graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As adults, both were drawn to New Orleans because of the city’s eccentric and seductive Southern culture. Both lived for a brief time in New York City. Percy loved telling stories with his pen, Lankard with his camera.
Like a protagonist in a Percy novel, Lankard sees himself as a wayfarer on a quest for identity and meaning. He says, “I aspire to do what Percy did as an author in my photographs. Percy posed questions about perception. Philosophical questions.”
For the past thirteen years of his over twenty-five year career, Lankard’s photography has focused on the “unhinged” by exploring life disrupted, such as the sudden loss of childhood innocence or the aftermath of tragedies like 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina: “Things gone in the blink of an eye.”
Lankard’s love of photography began with his family’s photo albums and home movies. He looked at them obsessively. He says, “I would visit, revisit, and revisit them. At some point I stopped looking at them for the people and started to see them as a remarkable record of culture and time.” But more than any single image in his family’s albums or movies, Lankard had a passion for the way, when combined, the images told a story. Even today he spends his time looking for stories. “I never turn off my eye,” he says. “I’m always trying to see the moments.”
This approach to the world, with eyes attentive to the moments, has served Lankard well. His images have been exhibited in galleries throughout the United States and internationally, such as in Spain, Germany, and France. His photographs have been published in Rolling Stone, Spin, The New York Times Magazine, Forbes, Allure, Newsweek, Time, and The Village Voice, among many others.
In 1995 Lankard co-founded the celebrated periodical Tribe Magazine (New Orleans) and served as its creative director, garnering many awards for his photography and design. He was ArtNudes.com “Photographer of the Year” in 2002 and New Orleans Magazine’s “Person to Watch” in 2007. After Hurricane Katrina, and in an effort to help rebuild the arts community in New Orleans, he co-founded the nonprofit New Orleans Photo Alliance.
Only recently did Lankard move back to his home state of North Carolina, where he continues to challenge himself creatively, taking photographs and also exploring the language of photography. Lankard offers art lectures throughout North Carolina. And he teaches classes, such as his popular “The Enduring Image: Defining Your Style and Vision” at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies and the Carrboro Arts Center. His website is: www.BryceLankard.com.
