Congratulations to the 2023 Photography Network Awardees
PN Project Grant winners:
The Photography Network project grant is designed to help emerging scholars, curators, and artists with funds needed to complete a work in progress. This grant supports the publication of a book or article, or the mounting of an exhibition that cannot be completed in its most desirable form without a subsidy.
Passengers appear on a bus in Manhattan during the 1965 Northeast Blackout, René Burri / Magnum Photos
Myles Little, “Blackout: Photography and Darkness: New York City 1965-1985”
This fascinating and innovative dissertation proposes to “tell the story of New York City in the Dark” by looking at the period between the mid 1960s to the mid 1980s when the city was hit not only with numerous blackouts, but also surging crime, urban blight, and white flight. Little receives this grant to help fund his research in the archives of documentary photographer Rene Burri in Lausanne, Switzerland who made photographs during the 1965 blackout in New York City.
Photograph by Bengali pictorialist Arya Kumar Chowdhury published with his article Camera r Dwara Bibidha Monobhaber Prakash
[Expression of Different Feelings through the Camera] in the Bangla periodical Bharati (Jaistha 1321 B.S./May 1914)
Ranu Roychoudhuri, The Cosmopolitan Camera: Seeing (Non)art in India
This book proposes to rethink how the global history of photography unfolded in twentieth century India by exploring the tension in photographs that are simultaneously art and “not-quite-art.” Grounded in a deep and interdisciplinary methodology, the proposed book is wide in scope and promises to bring new perspective to the history of photography in India. Roychoudhuri receives this grant to support image licensing costs for the book.
Morris Lum, Golden Happiness Plaza, Calgary Chinatown, 2015
Morris Lum, Tong Yan Gaai
The lyrical and timely book compiles more than a decade of photographic documentation of Chinatown communities across the US and Canada, treating each façade, as the artist writes “as an individual portrait that directs attention to the functionality of Chinatown and explores the generational context of how “Chinese” identity is expressed in these structural enclaves.” The PN project grant will help support publication of this beautiful and poignant photobook.
PN Book Prize Awardees:
Karina H. Corrigan and Stephanie Tung, Power and Perspective: Early Photography in China
An exceptional accomplishment, this powerhouse of an exhibition catalogue from the Peabody Essex Museum presents a survey of photography in nineteenth-century China that is so thoughtfully constructed, so thoroughly researched, so lovingly reproduced, and so accessibly and engagingly written that the jury felt we needed to single it out for the top prize. The book combines rich and informative “potted histories” surrounding a range of objects in the PEM collection with longer essays that delve into critical issues in historical context. There are plenty of difficult images here, but the authors handle them with great care and historical and cultural sensitivity. The book also takes account of the conditions and provenance of the collection itself. The breadth and nuance of the study is tremendous, as is the quality of the reproductions. Power and Perspective is a wonderful historical resource, a beautifully executed presentation of images, and a highly digestible read.
Honorable Mention
Brian Piper, Carla Williams, John Edwin Mason, Jr., and Russell Lord, Called to the Camera: Black American Studio Photographers
This exhibition catalog from the New Orleans Museum of Art gathers together work by more than three dozen Black American studio photographers working in a wide variety of photographic styles, formats, and genres. On juror nicely summed up the book as “the kind of collection of images and essays that I have wanted for a long time: one that tells the story of Black photography as American photography from its invention to the present day; one that places the work of studio photographers – and vernacular photography in general – front and center to show its significance in forging identity and creating community; and one that also shows how a well-curated collection of studio photography can allow for tracing the evolution of photographic styles and movements in general.” Jurors also noted the quality of the essays and the reproductions in this beautiful and important book.
Thy Phu, Warring Visions: Photography and Vietnam
Phu’s book explores photography from dispersed communities throughout Vietnam and the Vietnamese diaspora to tell a more nuanced story about the Vietnam war, and to reframe our ideas about war photography. The stakes of the story told go beyond photography in Vietnam to counter multiple assumptions and categories in the history of photography and the visual culture of the Vietnam War. Phu explores journalistic and vernacular images as well as contemporary art in an effort to piece together an archive where there is none, showing how the process of reconstituting visual archives is intrinsic to the Vietnamese diaspora. Jurors called the book provocative, original, insightful, and moving.
Gary Van Zante, The Presence of Something Past: Ulrich Wüst Photographs
This book is the first monographic survey of East-German-born photographer Ulrich Wüst. Jurors found this lushly illustrated book to be not only a well-written and organized retrospective of Wüst’s photographic oeuvre, exploring connections between Wust’s work and a range of contemporaries and predecessors from Bernd and Hilla Becher to Walker Evans and Lewis Baltz, but also a valuable introduction to photography in East Germany and the urban landscape in the German Democratic Republic. Van Zante’s substantive essay opens up the story of photography as art in East Germany and weaves the development of Wüst's practice through key historical moments.
Elizabeth Edwards and Ella Ravilious, eds. What Photographs Do: The Making and Remaking of Museum Cultures
A powerful and even radical assessment of photography's role within an institution--the Victoria & Albert Museum—What Photographs Do is a fascinating volume full of rarely seen reproductions and surprising case studies. By looking at all the photographs in the museum except for those that are collected as art, this thoughtfully compiled book of essays from both academics and museum professionals considers the role of photography in making the museum ecosystem. One juror noted that “It really is special in how [the book] bridges the siloes of the museum and highlights such a crucial, yet overlooked aspect of its innerworkings as well as its mythologizing.” Access the book for free at: www.uclpress.co.uk