Brick City Gallery, 215 West Mill Street in Springfield, is presenting Partial to Home and Juke Joint: Photographs by Birney Imes, January 24-February 21, 2014.

Birney Imes will be speaking about his work Thursday, February 6 at 7pm, in Glass Hall 102. His presentation is free and open to the public. He will also be present 6:00 -8:00 pm Friday, Feburary 7, at Brick City Gallery for First Friday ArtWalk.

Gallery hours are: 11am-6pm Monday-Friday, and Noon-5pm Saturday. Gallery is closed during national and university holidays. Admission is free and open to the public.

For more than 20 years Birney Imes roamed the countryside of his native Mississippi photographing the people and places he encountered along the way. Working in both black and white and color, Imes’ photographs take viewers inside juke joints and dilapidated restaurants scattered across that landscape. There he introduces the viewer to, as one writer put it, “the characters and locales that linger in the margins of Southern memory and culture.”

Working in both black and white and color, Imes’ photographs have been collected in three books: Juke Joint, Whispering Pines, and Partial to Home, and have been exhibited in solo shows in the United States and Europe. His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Art Institute of Chicago, La Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris and many public and private collections in the U.S. and abroad.

A self-taught photographer, Birney Imes is a lifelong resident of Columbus, Mississippi, where he is Editor and Publisher of The Dispatch, the area’s daily newspaper. He has received two Individual Artist Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Author Robert Ford has said, “So appealing in Birney Imes’ photographs is the sensation they create in us that here we are being shown, and even intruding on things –expressions of face, dispositions of furniture in rooms, eventful effects of light- that have not been shown before and that seem secret, even forbidden, exotic to us, even though we may have stood in those very rooms and roads ourselves, or believe we know what lies outside each frame.”