WORDS, WORDS, WORDS

The old saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words,” seems to suggest that a photograph transcends language, but words have been a key part of many important photographers’ work—from the billboards and signs in many Walker Evans’ photos to Lee Friedlander’s 2019 book, Signs, for example. The interplay of language and image can create a vivid sense of tension, irony, or poignance. The size and shapes of a font are visual aspects that can carry as much weight as any other aspect in the frame.

Praxis Gallery presents photographic art that includes written language as a fundamental aspect of the composition, including text in the form of signs or fragments of signs, handwriting scrawled over the photo, graffiti and palimpsests, just to name a few iterations of the theme. All genres, capture types, black & white and color, traditional and non-traditional photographic and digital post-production processes are welcome for submission.

JUROR | DALLAS CROW
Dallas Crow is a photographer, teacher and writer living in St. Paul, Minnesota. As a high school English teacher for over twenty years, Dallas Crow co-teaches a course at Breck School with an art teacher in which students combine language and images. His own poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have been published in numerous periodicals, anthologies, and in the sidewalks of St. Paul. His chapbook, Small, Imperfect Paradise, was published by Parallel Press at the University of Wisconsin. His photographs have appeared in galleries in Arizona, Kansas, Minnesota, Oregon, South Carolina, Vermont, Halifax (Canada), and Athens (Greece) and on the covers of multiple books and magazines. In addition, his solo exhibit of photographs from the 49th parallel, "The Other Border," was mounted at Praxis Gallery in Minneapolis in the fall of 2018.