Photographer Andy McMillan has amassed a substantial portfolio of commissioned editorial projects that include The New York Times, Essence, Mother Jones, US News, and World Report among others. In 2006, he embarked on an ambitious series of landscape imagery and portraits of individuals of the ill-fated and Christian theme park and housing development in South Carolina initiated by Jim Bakker, the high-profile televangelist who fell from grace in the late 1980s. The series tells the story of a community of disillusioned followers who remain true to their fate, yet continued to reside in a crumbling infrastructure.
During his summer residency at McColl Center for Art + Innovation, McMillan will focus on a new series that will draw from the tradition of the human figure as depicted in the southern landscape. Among these sources are Civil War-era photographs in which deceased soldiers were moved around the battlefield on photographs by photographers for more dramatic effect, thereby fictionalizing the true events.
Entitled The June Singers, the title comes from a combination of two tragic characters from 20th Century American Literature: John Singer from Carson McCullers' The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter and June Engstrom from John Updike’s Rabbit, Run. The June Singers is also meant to allude to a type of light (June: bright summer) and the more literal limits of photography (Singer: singing being aural and outside the realm of what’s photographically recordable).