Walk into 1828 Coffee Co. on an ordinary Tuesday and you will get a pour-over and a seat by the window in the oldest commercial building between Atlanta and Macon. Walk in during the third weekend of September and you might find yourself standing next to a framed photograph of a tobacco barn, a stranger from Nashville asking where to find the courthouse, and a stamp pad waiting to mark your passport. For three days a year, the coffee shop is also an art gallery, and nobody warned you.
That is the real shape of SlowExposures, the photography festival that has run every September in Pike County since 2003. This year it lands September 18 through 20, and if you already live around the square, the version of this weekend worth knowing is not the tourism-brochure version. It is the practical one: what closes, what doubles as something else, and why a county with two traffic lights somehow pulls photographers in from across the country without ever building a hotel to house them.
Three Days, Not Just a Saturday
The festival opens Friday night, September 18, with a private soiree for entrants at Split Oak Farm. That part belongs to the photographers. What belongs to the rest of us starts the next morning, when the PopUp Tour opens to the public and stays open through Sunday afternoon. Saturday carries the heaviest traffic: a book fair runs from 1 to 3 p.m. at the R.F. Strickland Building in downtown Concord, where the Main Exhibition is hung, and the day builds toward the PopUp Raffle at the Saturday Night Supper that evening.
The Main Exhibition itself will not stay in Pike County long. After its run at Strickland's, the selected images travel to the Cochran Gallery in LaGrange for a month, which means the version you see on the square this September is a limited window, not a standing exhibit you can catch later if you miss it.
Jerry Atnip of Nashville returns this year as the PopUp Juror, a role he has held in past editions of the show, and photographer Coco Conroy is among the jurors selecting the Main Exhibition. Neither of those names will mean much if you are grabbing lunch on your way to the pharmacy. What matters more locally is where the PopUp Tour actually happens: six to eight exhibits, staged in nontraditional venues in and around the Courthouse Square in Zebulon, according to the festival's own description of the tour. That is the part that reaches into daily life here.
The Businesses Doing Double Duty
In past editions, that has meant real places you already use. 1828 Coffee Co. has hosted a solo photography show inside its walls. Fishtales Bar and Grill has hung prints between the dinner tables. A Novel Experience, the bookstore in Zebulon, has run a Saturday morning brunch alongside a photo exhibit and even hosted a Juror's Talk. The Pike County Courthouse itself, the same building where the Board of Commissioners holds its regular meetings, has been pressed into service as a gallery space. None of these are pop-up storefronts rented for the occasion. They are the businesses and public buildings already doing their normal jobs, asked to do a second one for a weekend.
That is the detail that separates this festival from a typical small-town street fair. There is no fairground, no rented tent city, no temporary vendor row built from scratch. The county's late-19th-century commercial buildings, the ones that carried the cotton economy through Pike County a hundred years ago, are simply reopened as galleries because they are still standing and still in use. A portion of the festival's profits goes to Pike Historic Preservation specifically to keep those buildings standing for the next year's show, which means the festival is quietly subsidizing the same storefronts you walk past every week.
What Actually Changes Downtown for 72 Hours
If you live here, the useful part of this weekend is logistics, not itinerary. A few things to plan around:
- Run your errands early. The festival's own visitor guide is blunt about it: most everything closes by 9 p.m. that weekend, including the grocery store. If Saturday dinner depends on a grocery run, make it before evening.
- Do not expect overflow parking downtown. With no hotels in Pike County, out-of-town visitors are staying in Griffin, Thomaston, Fayetteville, or Peachtree City and driving in for the day, which puts more cars on the square than a typical Saturday, concentrated around the same few blocks.
- The courthouse itself may be closed to its usual business. In years when the PopUp Tour has used the Pike County Courthouse as a venue, it becomes gallery space, not government office, for the run of the show.
- Your regular lunch spot might be busier than usual, or it might be the show. Fishtales and 1828 Coffee Co. have both operated as gallery hosts in the past, which means checking ahead before you plan a quiet coffee run.
None of this requires a special trip. It requires knowing that the town's rhythm shifts for three days without any of the buildings changing hands.
Why No One's Building a Hotel
Here is the part that actually explains why this keeps working. Zebulon is the county seat and the largest city in Pike County, with a population of about 1,200 people. The festival it hosts draws visitors from across the United States, has won a Governor's Award for the Arts and Humanities, and has run for over two decades. That is a serious mismatch of scale, and most towns this size would either outgrow their infrastructure or fail to draw a crowd worth the effort.
SlowExposures avoids both outcomes by never asking the county to become something it is not. There is no hotel because the festival was never built around overnight capacity. There are two traffic lights in the county, and the visitor guide says so itself, matter-of-factly, as a way of setting expectations rather than apologizing for them. The show works by using what is already standing: barns, tenant houses, courthouses, coffee shops, and bookstores that will go back to their ordinary function the following Monday. The festival's entire footprint is temporary by design, which is exactly why it has been sustainable for twenty-three years running.
Twenty-Three Septembers Running
The math is simple once you lay it out. The festival launched in 2003. Its 20th annual run fell in 2023. This September marks the 23rd. That kind of run length in a county this small is not an accident of tourism marketing. It is a volunteer effort that has kept finding new use for the same handful of historic buildings, year after year, without needing to expand beyond what the town can actually hold.
For residents, that continuity is the quiet payoff. The buildings that host the PopUp Tour, the ones with cracked brick and second stories that have not been renovated into something else, are still standing in large part because a festival dedicated to photographing the rural South has spent two decades making sure they had a reason to stay open. That is a different kind of neighborhood asset than a new restaurant or a repaved road. It is the reason downtown Zebulon still looks like downtown Zebulon.
If you are new to the square or you have lived here through a dozen of these Septembers already, the same advice holds: plan your week around the closures, not the show. Grab your groceries by Thursday. Expect a stranger with a camera bag asking directions to Strickland's. And if your coffee shop looks different than usual come the third weekend of the month, that is not a renovation. That is just what September looks like here.
If you're weighing a move to Zebulon or already calling it home and thinking about what's next, Christie Howell Arnold has spent years working this corner of Pike County and is always glad to talk through what a particular block, subdivision, or historic storefront is really like to live near. Let's Connect.
