Artist Statement
If the Civil War crippled the South, then air conditioning finished it off.
There was a time when every significant life event occurred on the porch. People visited with one another, courted, conducted business, ate summertime meals, cleaned guns and boots, shelled butterbeans, watched fireflies, and listened to crickets while gazing at the star-filled sky.
Porch Sitting has gone the way of hand-churned ice cream and the quilting bee.
But there is hope. Our dogs maintain the tradition.
Process Statement
The photographic series, PORCH DOGS, is a collection of environmental portraits of the Southern Dog and his or her universe. Nell photographs using digital capture. The images are color, archival, museum-quality ink jet prints framed and matted to 24X 24.” The editions are limited to of 10.
The preservation of southern culture informs Nell Dickerson’s photography. She grew up in the deep South where antebellum ruins sparked her historic preservation passion.
She documented that passion in two commercially successful photography books:
GONE: A Photographic Plea for Preservation (BelleBooks, Inc.; 120 pages) debuted in 2011 as #1 on Amazon’s lists for both Photography and Architecture books.
PORCH DOGS (John F. Blair Publisher; 112 pages) debuted in 2013 as #1 on Amazon's list for both Photography and Animals. In 2014, Porch Dogs won both an Independent Book Publishers Association Benjamin Franklin Award™ and a Gold Medal. It also won a Bronze Medal from the Independent Publisher Book Awards.
She obtained her first BA degree in Anthropology from Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Two years later, she obtained a BFA in Film and Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute. After a ten-year career working in Hollywood, Nell went back to school for her Masters of Architecture from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. She is a licensed architect. To fund her photography, she maintains parallel careers in art direction/set design for movies and project management for architecture.
Nell's photographs have appeared in juried and gallery exhibitions around the United States and Europe, including the Gallery Valid Foto in Barcelona, Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans, New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe, the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, California and The Spiva Center for the Arts in Joplin, Missouri.
She currently photographs in Africa where she is working on an extensive series about conservation.
How to use our image viewer
Click on any of the thumbnail images to launch the viewer. You can then navigate forward and backward within the portfolio by clicking the left or right side of the enlarged image. Click the add to collection checkbox to automatically add an image to your collection. Image tags or search engine keywords appear below the collections' checkbox and each word or phrase is a link to potentially more image matches.
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