The Albany Area Arts Council (AAAC) will be opening their newest exhibit this Thursday, October 6, 2022, featuring the work of Photojournalist, Niel McGahee entitled “In Or- dinary Time: A Collection of Photographs of the People of the Southeastern United States.” The exhibit dates will be October 6-November 17, 2022, at the Albany Area Arts Council Carnegie Building located at 215 N. Jackson Street in downtown Albany. An Opening Reception for this exhibit will be held on Thursday, October 13, 2022, from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. at Carnegie.

A native of Thomaston, Georgia, Niel McGahee’s cameras have captured compelling images for nearly five decades. Graduating from Georgia Southwestern State University in 1971, he moved

to Rochester, New York to study photojournalism at the Rochester Institute of Technology, be- ginning his photojournalism career in Florida in 1974. Beginning his career covering overseas stories in 1979, McGahee reported on wars that rocked Central America, followed by coverage of war, famine, and refugees in Africa. His in-depth photo essays have embraced such topics as AIDS, aging, physical disabilities, poverty, homelessness, and race.

McGahee’s list of state, national and international photo awards include the Leica Oskar Bar- nack Prize, which is considered the most prestigious award in photojournalism; the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award and the Nikon World Understanding Award. Additionally, he was twice nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and was runner-up for the 1978 prize. In 2019, he was named “Artist-in-Residence” at the “Slow Exposure – Photographs of the Rural South” Festival in Zebulon, Georgia. McGahee’s work is prominently featured in “The Gold Medals: 60 Years of the World’s Best Photojournalism,” by legendary New York Times Photo Editor, John C. Morris and “Photojournalism: The Art of the Moment,” by Bill Kuykendall, San Francisco University.

“Throughout my 40-year career as a photojournalist, I have always been drawn to the people whose life is a struggle,” said McGahee. “I think the foreword to my book “In Ordinary Time,” makes the best statement about my work – “Glimpses of them every day along every mile of some pointless journey to wherever. Unknowable faces on street corners and in pool halls, in dime stores and bars, soup kitchens and gas stations and strip malls and empty cars. Ordinary people living ordinary lives under ordinary circumstances – their poetic faces offering dignity to a chaotic world too busy to stop and look and appreciate. My travels exposed me to their glimpses, and I stopped and talked and pointed my camera and tried to capture a poem I the making. In Ordinary Time.”

Throughout his career, McGahee took the time to photograph the people of his beloved South. Now, nearly 50 years later, he has assembled those black and white photos into an exhibition, “In Ordinary Time; photographs of the people of the Southeastern United States.” His photo- graphs have been shown at galleries in Zebulon, Thomaston, and Cordele, Georgia, as well as Reinhardt University in Waleska, Georgia and Hendersonville, North Carolina.

For additional exhibits or events happening at the AAAC, visit albanyartscouncil.org.