BIRNEY IMES (b. 1951 in Columbus, Mississippi) graduated with a degree in History from The University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 1973. Shortly after graduating, he set about teaching himself the art and craft of photography. In 1985 he received the National Endowment Art Fellowship Grant. Throughout his career, Birney Imes has focused his camera upon the people, places, and cultural events of the Mississippi Delta. Acclaimed author Robert Ford has said, “So appealing in Birney Imes’s photographs is the sensation they create in us that here we are being shown, are even intruding on things – expressions of face, dispositions of furniture in rooms, eventful effects of light – that have not been shown before and that seem secret, even forbidden, exotic to us, even though we may have stood in those very rooms and roads ourselves, or believe we know what lies outside each frame.” Imes’s work is held in such public collections as the Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and The Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego. Publications include Whispering Pines (1994), Partial to Home (1994) and Juke Joint (1990).