Jack Spencer
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Jack Spencer is a self-taught American artist who specializes in photography Spencer was born in Kosciusko, Mississippi in 1951 lives and works in Nashville, Tennessee.
Spencer's first love was music and he actually performed in a few rock bands and even cut a record.
He is probably best know for his series called "Native Soil." This particular series opened doors for him and caused his career to flourish. Deep sepia tones combined with deep-South imagery left quite an impression on the psyche of most viewers who have experienced them.
Spencer's photographs are rightly viewed as art works considering what the photographer does in the darkroom. There is an intensity embuing the work employing greater and greater degrees of difficulty in manipulating the images to produce these finely tuned photographs works with the same level of intensity as any other artist in any other medium.
Spencer's "Lost Boys" series came about because of the abuse he saw in his own community of Nashville where a young boy Pel Gai was murdered in a nightclub there. Pel Gai is from the Southern part of Sudan and many of these young boys were sent to the US, after reaching a refugee camp in Kenya. There are around 150 of these boys who live in the Nashville area.
In "The South By It's Photographers" Spencer's work was included with many other Southern artists including Shelby Lee Adams, Walter Beckham, Debbie Fleming Caffery, William Christenberry, Chip Cooper, William Greiner, Birney Imes and Melissa Springer among others. This exhibition travelled from the Birmingham Museum of Art in Birmingham, Alabama to Columbia Museum of Art in Columbia, South Carolina and Louisiana Center for Arts and Sciences Baton Rouge, Louisiana. This became an auspicious exhibition that spurred the careers of many of these Southern photographers. This exhibition was also made into a book by Susan Sipple Elliott, with an introduction by John E. Schloder "The South By It's Photographers".
Spencer's work was also chosen to be in the ground-breaking exhibition "Picturing the South" curated by Ellen Fleurov, curator of photography at The High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia.
