Looking back on my email box, I found the first correspondence letting me know that I had been selected to participate in fourth series of the Palmetto Portraits Project a year ago today.  Less than five days from now, on Wednesday, September 16, 2009, the exhibit will open to the public with a reception at MUSC’s new James B. Edwards College of Dental Medicine, located at 29 Bee St. in Charleston, SC.

The PPP was started a little over four years ago by the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC), in partnership with the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston, and the South Carolina State Museum.  The goal of the project was to commission approximately twenty noted and emerging photographers from across South Carolina to focus on portraying South Carolinians in the Lowcountry, the Piedmont, and the Upstate—reflecting the full range and diversity of the state’s citizens, occupations, and recreational activities. Creating a collection of art to display within MUSC’s educational and clinical buildings, the University hopes to remind students, faculty, staff, and visitors of those they serve at MUSC and throughout South Carolina. MUSC and the selected photographers have broadened the impact of the project by donating an identical set of photographs to the permanent collection of the South Carolina State Museum in Columbia.

This was an amazing project to be invited to be a part of, and am still humbled to this day to have had the opportunity to work with so many great photographers.  While the past year of my life has led me in a in a direction that I never saw coming, both personally and professionally, I am deeply thankful for the people I have had the opportunity to meet while working on it, and the new way in which it has taught me to look at my native state.  I don’t feel I can ever thank those who have supported me, and helped me with this project over the past year enough.  I will be eternally grateful to all of you!

If you don’t have the opportunity to make it to the opening on Wednesday, but find yourself in Charleston, SC the project will be hanging in James B. Edwards College of Dental Medicine, located at 29 Bee St. for the foreseeable future.  Please stop by and take a look at all of the amazing work of the series IV photographers.  It will give you a new appreciation for the people and places of this state.

for more information on this project, please visit the official project site at http://palmettoportraits.musc.edu/

*Update* Check out the review of the show in the Charleston City Paper.