Call for Submissions: PN Awards 2025
Book Prize
Photography Network welcomes submissions for its 2025 annual book prize that honors innovation in photography scholarship, expression, and dissemination. The book prize will be awarded to a scholarly monograph, edited volume, exhibition catalog, or photobook published between June 1, 2024 and June 1, 2025. Submissions must be in English and authored by current members of Photography Network. Not yet a PN member? Join here
Note: PN does offer a limited number of free need-based memberships in recognition of the uneven distribution of resources in the field.
To submit an eligible book for consideration, email your name, book title, and a brief description of the publication to Awards Coordinator, Candice Jansen at photographynetworkawards@gmail.com with “PN book prize 2025” in the subject line by June 15, 2025. You will be asked to supply 4 copies of the book (both in hardcopy and digitally) to the awards coordinator and to members of the jury for consideration. Digital-only entry concessions can be made for self-published and/ or independent presses.
For a list of last year’s winners, see our website.
Project Grant
Photography Network seeks submissions for its annual project grant designed to help emerging scholars, curators, and artists with funds needed to complete a work in progress. This grant will support 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. Funds can be used toward future expenses or to reimburse expenses already incurred. Applicants must be current members of Photography Network. Not yet a PN member? Join here
Note: PN does offer a limited number of free need-based memberships in recognition of the uneven distribution of resources in the field.
The grant proposal must include: a 500-word description of the project, a publishing or exhibition timeline, a detailed budget, a list of other funding sources (if any), and a current CV.
Please email grant proposals to Awards Coordinator, Candice Jansen at photographynetworkawards@gmail.com with “PN project grant 2025” in the subject line.
Grant proposals are due by June 15, 2025.
2025 Jurors
Azza El Hassan
Azza El Hassan is a professor of media practices at the Doha institute for Graduate Studies and an award winning documentary filmmaker. Her work includes The Unbearable Presence of Asmahan, Kings & Extras and News Time. She is the founder of The Void Project, a research and media production project that examines the effect of colonial plundering on the formation of a present visual Arab narrative. She has restored several Palestinian films from the revolutionary era of Palestinian Cinema and her book The Afterlife of Palestinian Images: Visual Remains and the Archive of Disappearance (2024) uniquely addresses how colonial violence alters and changes visual objects - which in turn affects how a society and culture relates to its own images. Azza El Hassan is the recipient for the Outstanding Achievement Award, BAFTSS, UK.
Siobhan Angus
Siobhan Angus works at the intersections of art history, media studies, and the environmental humanities. Her current research explores the visual culture of resource extraction with a focus on materiality, labor, and environmental justice. She is an assistant professor of Media Studies at Carleton University and holds a Ph.D. in Art History and Visual Culture from York University where her dissertation was awarded the Governor General’s Gold Medal. Prior to joining Carleton, Angus was the Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University. Her research has been published in Environmental Humanities, Capitalism and the Camera (Verso, 2021) and October. Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography (Duke University Press 2024) was awarded a 2024 Photography Network Book Prize and was a finalist for College Art Association’s 2025 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award. At the heart of her research program lies an intellectual and political commitment to environmental, economic, and social justice.
Drew Thompson
Drew Thompson is a writer and independent curator who currently teaches at the Bard Graduate Center and Bard College. His curatorial projects include the first museum retrospective of the African American artist Benjamin Wigfall at the Dorsky Museum of Art and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the first exhibition of African art at the Bard Graduate Center Art Gallery, SIGHTLINES. He is the author of one of the first historical survey of photography in modern and contemporary Mozambique titled Filtering Histories: The Photographic Bureaucracy in Mozambique, 1960 to Recent Times (University of Michigan Press, 2021), and is currently at work on a book about Black American daily and artistic uses of Polaroids, provisionally titled Coloring Black Surveillance through Polaroids: The Poetics of Black Solidarity and Sociality. His writings on modern and contemporary photography and visual arts have appeared in edited volumes published by David Zwirner Books, The Walther Collection, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Art Institute of Chicago, and The Image Center.
