November 19, 2026
5:30 pm
Location
Old Main Art Galleries
The Mississippi State University Department of Art Galleries is pleased to welcome acclaimed Mississippi photographer Birney Imes on Thursday, November 19th.
Imes curated a body of German photographer Axel Kustner's work into the show Gon' Play It For Lil' Brother at the Black Prairie Blues Museum in West Point, Mississippi in 2024. The show has now traveled around the state to other institutions under the title A Blues Odyssey- The Photography of Axel Kustner, and is on display in the Old Main Art Galleries through November 20th.
His talk will be during the closing reception for the exhibition. Doors open at 5:30. Free and open to the public!
About the Curator:
For more than 20 years, Birney Imes roamed the countryside of his native Mississippi photographing the people and places he encountered along the way. Born Vinton Birney Imes III in Columbus, Mississippi, in 1951, he went on to graduate with a degree in history from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville in 1973. Growing up white in the South during the Civil Rights Movement helped shape his views on history and that is where his photography career originated from. After graduating, Imes set out to teach himself the art and craft of photography. His works included commercial and studio photography alongside photojournalism. One subject is his passion: his homescapes that he grew up within rural Mississippi.
Imes once said, “When my high school was integrated in the late ‘60s, the veil began to part, and I started to see the richness and diversity of culture that till then had been hidden from me. When I began photographing six or seven years later, it was in part my wish and my need to overcome this ignorance that helped make my choice of subject an obvious one.”
Working in both black and white and color, Birney Imes’ photography takes viewers inside juke joints and dilapidated restaurants scattered across that landscape. There Birney Imes introduces the viewer to, as one writer put it, “the characters and locales that linger in the margins of Southern memory and culture.”
Birney Imes’ photography has been collected in three books: Juke Joint, Whispering Pines and Partial to Home, and has been exhibited in solo shows in the United States and Europe. Birney Imes' photography is also 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. In 1985 he received the National Endowment Art Fellowship Grant.