NATCHEZ — Mississippi photographer Gretchen Haien, who has been invited to show her work at the Smithsonian, will be in Natchez today to give a presentation.

Haien will talk at 1 p.m. at M. Schon Gallery, 415 Main St. Her presentation will focus on photography as an expressive art form and will include slides of her work.

Haien’s work, “Interior Frontiers,” featuring gelatin photographs, will be on display at the gallery until May 2.

“Interior Frontiers” was part of a recent exhibit at the Walter Anderson Museum of Art in Ocean Springs. In 2005 this series was selected and honored by the Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters during their 26th annual awards ceremony and in 2006 this same work earned Haien the “Emerging Artist to Watch in Photography” honor from the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.

Haien said this suite of images “concerns itself with the single photograph. Each image presents internal relationships that are subjective and conceptual rather than objective and formal… each photo becomes an abstract and metaphysical slice of the real world charged with both the mystery and the magic of intuitive insight, uncovering the spiritual within the physical and allowing each photo to become…’ a space defined by space with a presence and an invitational whisper.”

Haien is currently professor of photography at Belhaven College in Jackson.

Her work has been shown extensively both nationally and worldwide and is in the permanent collections of many museums including the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson.