FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Feb. 25, 2010
Contact: Debra Williams
(662) 329-7119
ddw2@muw.edu

Vance to narrate photographic art of Gaines at Sunday at the Bluff program

COLUMBUS, Miss. –The photographic art of Marion Stark Gaines, Columbus native and Mississippi’s first published woman photographer, will be featured as part of the Sunday at the Bluff program on March 7 at 2 p.m. Mona Vance, archivist for local history at the Columbus-Lowndes Public Library, will narrate.
      
Gaines was born in Columbus on Aug. 10, 1850, and was married to Capt. Abner Gaines in 1879. She and her husband then moved to Peachwood in Wayne County. It was at Peachwood that Gaines developed her skills as a photographer during a cultural and artistic movement known as pictorialism.
    
She was able to transform her subjects into works of art, winning her an award in 1900 from the American Camera Club in Mobile. The award recognized her as Mississippi’s first woman photographer to be published in several publications, including Ladies’ Home Journal. She would later be described in a 1997 issue ofMississippi Magazine by Dr. Gene Fant Jr. as a “pioneering photographer.”
    
Her photographs depict floral themes and a glimpse of rural life in Southern Mississippi which include casual photos of African-American farm life and Native American women.
     
The program at the Plymouth Bluff Center is free and open to the public. For more information, call (662) 241-6214.