Congratulations to the 2022 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.
Paula Kupfer
Lola Álvarez Bravo, Paisajes de México (Landscapes of Mexico, 1954).
© Archivo Familia González Rendón
Doctoral Candidate, Department of the History of Art and Architecture, University of Pittsburgh “Ecocritical Constructions: Lola Álvarez Bravo’s Mexican Pasajes (1954)”
Kupfer is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Art and Architecture at University of Pittsburgh, and her research traces the intertwined histories of modern photography and architecture in and across Latin America, in dialogue with artists and practices in Europe and the US. Her essay, forthcoming in the journal Dialectic this fall, discusses Mexican photographer Lola Álvarez Bravo’s photomontage practice and reflects on the photographer’s idiosyncratic interpretation of architectural history in Mexico. The article engages archival evidence and comparative analysis to reveal connections between Alvarez Bravo’s conception of architecture and history, and key moments of Mexican environmental history. Kupfer will use the Project Grant to help cover costs associated with reproduction rights of Álvarez Bravo’s photographs.
Marie Meyerding
Mavis Mtandeki, Woman Collecting Wood in the Bush for Cooking in Khayelitsha, 1989
Doctoral Candidate, Department of Art History, Freie Universität Berlin “Sights of Struggle: The History of the Women of Tambo Village A Project to Digitize and Publish Mavis Mtandeki’s Archive”
Meyerding is a doctoral candidate at the Freie Universität Berlin, writing a dissertation on the representation of women in South African Photography. The “Sights of Struggle” project focuses on one of the first Black South African women photographers, Mavis Mtandeki, and her work documenting the political activism and everyday lives of women in Tambo Village near Cape Town. Meyerding will use the Project Grant to subsidize the digitization of Mtandeki’s photographic archive and toward the production of a book, which will combine Mtandeki’s photographs with interviews with inhabitants of Tambo Village to recount one of the many yet untold stories of anti-apartheid resistance.
PN Book Prize Awardees:
This prize seeks to honor innovation in photography scholarship, expression, and dissemination. For this award we considered scholarly monographs, edited volumes, exhibition catalogs, and photobooks published between January 1, 2020 and June 1, 2021.
Kate Palmer Albers, The Night Albums: Visibility and the Ephemeral Photograph (University of California Press)
The Night Albums offers a concise and revelatory consideration of the intrinsic ephemerality of photography. Drawing on case studies that range from the first photograph to contemporary artworks by Trevor Paglen, Oscar Munoz, and Cassils, Albers convincingly demonstrates that claims for photography’s permanence have been fraught throughout its history. Moreover, as she argues, we do well to attend to the ephemeral image, not as a glitch or an anomaly within the history of the medium, but as central part of what photography is. The jury found The Night Albums to be innovative and eloquent, and praised Albers’ “exacting research” and the “confidence and seriousness with which she links seemingly disparate practices and subjects, both popular and critical, under the rubric of ephemerality.”
Frank H. Goodyear, Lisa Hostetler, and Casey Riley, Marcia Resnick: As It Is or Could Be (Yale University Press in association with the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, the George Eastman Museum, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art)
This is the first exhibition catalog dedicated to the work of Marcia Resnick, and it offers a deep and fascinating dive into the untold history of an artist limited by gender, circumstance, and, at times, her own personal missteps. Through a series of illuminating essays by Goodyear, Hostetler, and Riley, Marcia Resnick: As It Is or Could Be examines Resnick’s eclectic oeuvre, ranging from her staged conceptual works, to celebrity portraiture, to ironic feminist interventions. In the process the catalog (like the exhibition which is on view at the Minneapolis Institute of Art until December 11) contributes to a broader, more complex, and more inclusive understanding of conceptual photography as it flourished in New York City in the 1970s.
Honorable Mention
Lily M. Cho, Mass Capture: Chinese Head Tax and the Making of Non-Citizens (McGill Queens University Press)
Following the in the footsteps of Tina Campt’s groundbreaking work, Mass Capture examines the formidable archive of CI-9’s, Canadian state documents used to monitor the identity and movement of Chinese migrants in and out of Canada from the late 19th to the mid 20th century. The jury found Cho’s work ambitious and deeply ethical as she locates in the photographs on the CI-9’s, an entry point to a vast history of non-citizenship, captivity, economic survival, and migration.
Anthony Troncale, ed., Words on Pictures: Romana Javitz and the New York Public Library's Picture Collection (Verso)
Described by one jury member as “a gem,” Words on Pictures is a compilation of previously unpublished writings and interviews by Javitz, head of the legendary Picture Collection at the New York Public Library from 1929 to 1968. Javitz was a vivid, incisive, and entertaining writer and the texts included in Troncale’s volume offer important theorizations of what it means to treat pictures as "documentary”; arguments and methods for their place in library work; and how pictures might democratize information, education, and culture at large. Words on Pictures is a valuable resource for photo-historians, Americanists, librarians, media theorists, and scholars of Javitz herself—who deserves to be much better known for her role in connecting photography to a rapidly changing media landscape.