Richard J. Alley

Cover story and photography for The Memphis Downtowner

June 2013

AIA Memphis is 60 years old – structurally sound, aesthetically designed, and moving ahead with the next step in its organized blueprint.

Architects, designers, engineers, and
architecture fans gathered on a
warm, spring night in April to celebrate the
60th anniversary of AIA Memphis. Fittingly,
the gala was held at the Pink Palace Museum,
an iconic, architectural landmark if ever there
was one, with its pink Georgian marble rising
from a sweeping lawn.

The Memphis chapter of American Institute
of Architects was founded in 1953, a time of
eastward expansion for Memphis. New ideas
such as the suburban Poplar Plaza Shopping
Center began taking customers from
Downtown’s venerable, stalwart department
stores, such as Goldsmith’s and Gerber’s.

“Memphis was a hotbed for designers in
the 1950s,” says Heather Koury, executive
director of AIA Memphis . . . (read more)

June 2013

Small Business Spotlight feature for The Memphis Daily News

June 10, 2013

Allison Rodgers will tell you that the most natural smile occurs going into, and coming out of, a laugh.

Rodgers has a lot to be smiling about these days. She and her husband, Jeff, are the owners of Allison Rodgers Photography on Collierville’s Historic Town Square.

It’s a business born of love. The two met while working at Good Advertising Agency and each made the rounds of agencies in town – including Sossaman & Associates (now Sullivan Branding), Red Deluxe and Walker Associates – as art directors before opening the photography studio in 2004.

At the time they opened the business in Olive Branch, Allison was working part time with Red Deluxe and Jeff was doing freelance design.

“It started quickly, faster than we wanted,” Allison Rodgers said. “This was supposed to be a part-time thing for me.”

The studio was founded at a time when “everybody was ready for a change in what they were seeing as far as traditional portraiture,” Rodgers said. “We were one of the first ones out of the gate with that. They were ready for images that had more life to them. They were ready to be able to have, personally, for themselves, what they were seeing in magazines. Up until this point, nobody was really doing that, nobody was doing that lifestyle, documentary, personality-driven, very custom work.”

The husband-and-wife team had found their niche and success followed, due in part to connections through the national network of the Professional Photographers of America that helped land them a gig doing the still photography for ABC’s “Extreme Home Makeover.”

The duo traveled to Montgomery, Ala., and Hattiesburg, Miss., where they worked closely with the show’s producers, a host of designers and the star, Ty Pennington . . . (read more)

Standout Profile for The Memphis Daily News

March 29, 2013

Willy Bearden is a local filmmaker best known for works such as his 2010 feature “One Came Home” and the Memphis Memoirs series on WKNO-TV.

He produced the video exhibitions for the Cotton Museum and has produced the New Year’s Eve telecast from Beale Street as well as the Blues Music Awards for the Blues Foundation.

The bearded and bespectacled Bearden is a renaissance man with a down-home flair whose talents extend far beyond any single medium.

“I’m a filmmaker, a writer and a storyteller, and I think all of these things are connected, at least as far as I’m concerned,” he said. “I couldn’t be a filmmaker if I weren’t a writer, and I couldn’t be a filmmaker if I didn’t know photography.”

And it’s his photography that will be in the spotlight during an opening reception Friday, March 29, at 6 p.m. at the Leadership Memphis Gallery 363 (365 S. Main St.) during the South Main Art Trolley Tour.

For the show, Bearden culled 10 years of photographs for the 20 or so to be edited, printed and framed.

“There’s a lot of work that goes into it,” Bearden said. “I’ve had a good time going through and choosing things, it’s been interesting to kind of walk back through the thousands of things I’ve shot.”

Ken Hall has partnered with Michel Allen in Allen Projects, a gallery and consulting firm, to curate shows for Leadership Memphis. The Bearden photography installation marks one year for such shows.

Hall has known Bearden for several years and was familiar with his video and production work, but when he saw the still photography for the first time, he wanted to showcase it to the public.

“I was just mesmerized by his great work in still photography,” Hall said. “So immediately – I think the next day – I called him for an exhibition at Gallery 363.”

Bearden, a Rolling Fork, Miss., native, spends a lot of time in the Delta and his photography represents this … (read more)

“Because I Said So” column for The Commercial Appeal

Feb. 28, 2013

Memories of baby held in phone, not in an album

The wall over the desk in my office at home is hung with snapshots of family and friends, inspiration for when I need a little push to write this column or anything else I might be working on.

The pictures have been culled from years of going through the photo albums of grandparents and parents. Many have been taken from place to place with moves over the years, tucked into books, shoeboxes and desk drawers.

Actual photo albums on my shelves, however, are few and far between. There are gaps in the years to be filled in by imagination. During a recent visit with my grandparents, my kids and I flipped through plastic-coated pages brittle with age, and took a trip into the distant past. Each leather-bound book was a time capsule filled with faded images from a camera, a contraption from the past that Jules Verne might as well have imagined.

These days most of us don’t carry cumbersome cameras that require a flashbulb, batteries and a roll of film. We have a phone. And that phone is, more than likely, equipped with an application that will make the snapshot you just took of your kid on a swing at the park look like it was taken in 1978. Or, if you prefer, 1928.

When I look at my own baby pictures, the washed-out tones and white, tell-tale borders help place the time firmly in the 1970s. The Instagram app does that for us now. Other than the electronic tablets in their hands, a picture of my kids last Christmas morning might just as easily have been taken four decades ago. It is a way for us to force nostalgia upon something witnessed only moments before.

Within our phones is where these photos will reside; a collection of ones and zeroes zipping through circuits and saved somewhere in a cloud. Something as precious as a baby book is quickly becoming an anachronism.

What seasoned parents know is that, with each child, the chances of putting together such a memento becomes slimmer and slimmer. When my oldest was born, I wasn’t snapping pictures with a telephone and texting them to family three states away. Had anyone suggested such a thing in 1998, I would have looked as confused as I was anyway standing there in the labor and delivery room at Baptist Hospital. Instead, I held up my 35mm Pentax and documented Calvin’s arrival into what now seems a low-fi, analog world. Those precious memories were entrusted to Walgreen’s and a day or two later I retrieved an envelope of glossy photos to tape into his book.

My 6-year-old, by contrast, pressured us for her book only last year. We were woefully short on actual, hard-copy photographs. What I did have was a phone full of her face. And some dinners I’d prepared. And quite a few of a recent show at the Hi-Tone, some plumbing that needed to be repaired and a particularly picturesque sunset.

What do we picture for the future? A set of hard drives arranged on the bookshelf by year? A lone smart phone hung on the wall above my desk? Document childhood well because it is fleeting and the memories captured will evaporate over time; gone, it seems, in an instagram.

Permanent link to The Commercial Appeal

Annual “20 under 30″ issue highlighting 20-somethings making great strides in the city for The Memphis Flyer

Jan. 24, 2013

These young people have graduated from their teens with a sense of responsibility beyond their years, and it is driving them to do good, to leave Memphis a better place. Within their ranks, there are advanced college degrees and long hours spent learning and perfecting a craft. The members of this group can dribble a ball, carry a tune, cook a meal, tell a joke, take a picture, book a show, raise money, raise awareness, and raise us all up if we put ourselves in their capable, young hands.

Each is an ambassador for our city. They are giving their best to make themselves and their community a better place to live and to visit.

News of violence and scandal can make the future seem bleak, but we can rest easier knowing that these 20 men and women are a part of that future. Keep an eye on them and watch what they can do when they put their minds and hearts to it … (read more)

Flyer cover 2013

Text and photography for the Let’s Go series of the “Living in the Moment” blog by Memphis Parent magazine

Oct. 15, 2012

It seems contradictory to think of visiting a cemetery as a way to appreciate life, but that’s just what we did on a recent in-service day for Memphis City Schools.

When I find myself with my four kids at home (they having invaded the sanctity of my office), my mind naturally goes to the outdoors and activities to keep them entertained.

My oldest had a school project due and would need to be taken to Elmwood Cemeteryto work on a documentary he and some classmates were producing for his class at White Station High.

Their topic was the Yellow Fever Epidemic and the cemetery has entire sections filled with victims and the nuns who cared for them.

The other three kids tagged along with me and we strolled the hilly grounds. From their offices at the 146-year-old Phillips Cottage that acts as Elmwood’s headquarters, a detailed map or self-guided audio tour can be had for nominal fees ($5 and $10, respectively), or a docent-led tour ($15/person) can be arranged.

There are also themed tours – Civil War history, African American history, arboretum – available. We, being adventurous and of short attention spans, opted for a hastily printed free map and our own, aimless wanderings to see what we could discover.

What we found was a monumental number of monuments to fallen soldiers from nearly every war, civic leaders, authors, mothers, fathers and, to my children’s surprise, children.

The headstones along the winding paths and grassy knolls are ornate and beautiful in their own right, and etched with the names of our city, its streets, neighborhoods, and buildings.

The cemetery, founded in 1852, was among a wave of garden cemeteries developed in the U.S. for the living as well as the dead. It was a popular tradition for families to picnic in these park-like settings on Sunday afternoons during the Victorian era. Today, Elmwood holds more than 75,000 grave sites that include generals and senators, mayors and millionaires, governors and paupers.

It’s a place where familiar family names stand out big and bold – Snowden, Church, Crump, Porter, and Overton. A walk through historic Elmwood, or any cemetery, offers the opportunity to teach our kids a little something about life and death, and something, too, about respecting our history.

Permanent link to Memphis Parent magazine

A publication of the Mississippi River Corridor – Tennessee

Summer 2012

Project writer responsible for all editorial content of this 32-page magazine. Stories written include: the Memphis Blues Trail; American Queen Steamboat Company, Ingram Barge, Buckaroo Hatters, Unique Museums of the Corridor, Sustainable Shelby, the Hatchie River, Mississippi River Trail and Chisholm Lake Store.

River Times 2012

Feature story for The Commercial Appeal

July 29, 2012

Historic-memphis.com began its cyber-life as a website for the alumni of Memphis Tech High. Begun by Gene Gill, a 1951 graduate of the school, the content soon outgrew the parameters of its yearbook-like platform. More specifically, the historical aspect of the high school, which dates to 1913, took on a life of its own, and with it, an interest in all manner of Memphis history.

“I called Gene and said, ‘The Tech site is dying on the vine … but we’re getting all these hits on the little portions that we have regarding the historical side of Memphis,’” said Dave French, a co-founder of the historic Memphis site and a 1969 graduate of Tech High.

The school site (memphistechhigh.com), while still active but no longer updating, is the dusting of ashes out of which arose a Phoenix or, more precisely, a Memphis, in all of her past glory. On the new historic-memphis.com site, there are photos and a wealth of information accompanying them on movie theaters, schools, restaurants, hotels, parks, entertainment venues, department stores and train stations, among many more. Yearbooks from area schools, event programs, diplomas, postcards and other marginalia can be found as well.

French recruited longtime friend (and 1969 Immaculate Conception graduate), Maureen Thoni White, to help with the research and scanning of photos and books. For the three admittedly novice historians, the site is a labor of love; there is no money made from it, nor are there any plans to monetize it.

“It’s full of useful information and is well done,” said G. Wayne Dowdy, manager of the history department at the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library and author of several books on Memphis history, including “A Brief History of Memphis.” “It may not be a ‘scholarly’ website, but then again it doesn’t pretend to be. In my opinion, having a group of passionate collectors post information on Memphis’s past is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the city’s history. Plus, it’s valuable when history is presented in a fun — even when the subject itself is not fun — and accessible format, rather than a stolid, academic one. In many ways, history, particularly local history, is too important to leave solely to historians.” … (read more)

“Hidden Memphis” feature for The Commercial Appeal

March 25, 2012

Memphis has a soul, and if you can hear it in the music and taste it in the food, then you can certainly see it in the photography of Don Newman.

Images that date back to the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s give us a glimpse of the city in her heyday, when Downtown was the focal point of shopping, commerce and entertainment.

Pick a street scene — Main Street, Madison Avenue, Union Avenue — and witness the men and women bustling from here to there. Stare into one, and you can almost hear their footsteps and feel the breeze as they walk past on their way to Goldsmith’s Department Store, Britling’s Cafeteria or the Warner Theater.

Though the sites themselves may be gone, their images live on and online at memphisheritage.org, where since January, the public can click on the Newman Collection portfolio and choose a print to view or purchase.

Newman, who passed away in 1994, was born in Memphis in 1919, and his interest in photography was fostered at an early age by an uncle in Meridian, Miss., who owned Hammond Photography Studio. After attending Tech High School, Newman was offered a job with George Haley, a well-known commercial photographer at the time.

His work with Haley began a career that would last a lifetime. “He thought maybe he would go on to college, but he took this job because he was interested in it and he never left; he stayed in photography because he loved it,” said Newman’s widow, Bertha Newman … (read more)

Contributor of copy and editorial direction for Memphians coffee table book

The Nautilus Publishing Company; Oxford, MS

ISBN 978-193694603-7

2011