The Arnold Newman Prize for New Directions in Photographic Portraiture is a $20,000 prize awarded annually to a photographer whose work demonstrates a compelling new vision in photographic portraiture. The Prize is generously funded by the Arnold & Augusta Newman Foundation and proudly administered by Maine Media Workshops + College.
The Griffin Museum is pleased to present an online exhibition to honor the three finalists for the Arnold Newman Prize.
Cheryl Mukherji – Wanted Beautiful Home Loving Girl
My work is an exploration of my origin and inheritance, which is embedded in the figure of my mother. It deals with memory, transgenerational trauma, personal and collective history–and how they inform identity. Using interdisciplinary mediums– such as photography, installations, printmaking, writing, and video–I centre and engage with women’s presence and experiences in the family albums which I brought with me to the United States from India upon immigrating. Family albums–a primary instrument of self-knowledge and representation–celebrate success, leaving out depictions of trauma, grief, and mourning from its pages to perpetuate the myth of an Ideal Family. Like a manifesto, it declares its intentions and motives through candid or staged photographs. In my practice, family albums are an entry way into domestic labour–not washing dishes or cleaning, but the work it takes to stay related to someone, even my mother.
My current project, Wanted Beautiful Home Loving Girl is an exploration of the legacies and conventions of matrimonial portrait photography in Indian arranged marriages. Inspired by matrimonial photographs of my grandmothers, aunts, and mother from family albums, I reimagine the tradition by staging portraits within my domestic space that often evoke Indian photo studios. The traditional matrimonial photograph acts as a visual currency exchanged between families wherein the prospective bride is expected to perform her desirability, femininity, and domesticity for the male suitor through prescribed gestures and good looks, which comply with Eurocentric beauty standards.
In the work, I explore the politics, aesthetics, and antithesis of desirability pertaining to portraiture in the contemporary context, working through feminist photographs and ‘thirst traps’, alike. Using self-portraiture, I visualize my body in scenes that are complex, exaggerated, and mundane restagings of vernacular and familial matrimonial archives. Focussing on refusal and resistance, the work acts as a counter-archive and emphasises quotidian forms of feminine self-representation through humour, performance, and play.
Preston Gannaway – Remember Me
Remember Me is a longitudinal essay exploring themes of loss, masculinity and mortality. It centers around a boy growing up in New Hampshire following the death of his mother when he was 4 years old. The series is on-going and now in its 19th year.
In early 2006, I was assigned to tell the story of a young couple dealing with terminal cancer while raising three children. I was there when the mother, Carolynne St. Pierre, died and continued to tell the family’s story as her husband Rich and her children, including 4 year-old EJ, struggled to cope with the loss. Through this, we all formed a deep connection. During the time I spent at the St. Pierre house I was often struck by how much closer I felt to the family than my own.
Though that original story was published the following year, and my work since has kept me moving around the country, I’ve regularly traveled back to New Hampshire to photograph. Carolynne endured difficult treatment hoping that she’d be able to imprint her children’s memories. She was afraid that EJ would be too young to remember her. In the photographs that I make now, I am witnessing what Carolynne couldn’t — her son growing up. The work in the years since her death focus on EJ and his relationship with his father, and how, through all his relationships, EJ is finding his own identity and expression of masculinity.
With each passing year, EJ and Rich have come to reflect the struggles endemic to rural and middle-class America. To ease the financial burdens of college, and follow in his father’s footsteps, EJ enlisted in the New Hampshire Air National Guard. Rich is a proponent of the blue collar job training that the military provides. Rich struggles with debt and EJ now needs to contribute financially. A free-thinker and a self-proclaimed feminist, EJ is navigating manhood with the backdrop of Trump nationalism, rampant mass shootings and extreme political polarization.
Memories change over time. Both memory and time have been fundamentally linked to photography since its beginning. Most times I ask EJ, he can’t recall any memories of his mother. He tells me he doesn’t remember a time when I haven’t been making photographs of him. I’m continually questioning the relationship between photographer and “subject,” and am additionally interested in reversing the traditional dynamic of male photographer and female muse.
This story, which is ostensibly about a specific boy, also reflects my own upbringing, and hopefully that of its audience. My own feelings of loss and memory color the images I make of Rich and EJ. The work leverages photography’s capacity for openness and ambiguity, and its resulting ability to deepen empathy and connect us.
Stacy Kranitz – After a Denied Abortion
These photographs depict the aftermath of a woman forced into a life-threatening pregnancy in the state of Tennessee. In August of 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and triggered Tennessee’s total abortion ban to go into effect. The same lawmakers who voted to ban abortion also voted against a social safety net to support mothers living below the poverty line.
When Mayron Michelle Hollis got pregnant at 31, she was three years sober after first getting hooked on drugs at 12. The state had taken away three of her children, and she was fighting to keep the fourth, a baby girl who was only months old. Amid the turmoil, Mayron learned she was pregnant again. But this time, doctors warned her that her fetus might not make it. The embryo was implanted in scar tissue. There was a high chance the pregnancy could rupture, blowing open her uterus and killing her. The baby, if she survived, would come months early and face serious medical risks. Doctors advised Mayron to terminate her pregnancy. But that same week, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and triggered Tennessee’s total abortion ban to go into effect. Women with means could flee the state. But those like Mayron, with limited resources and lives entangled with the child welfare and criminal justice systems, could not. The same state that questioned her fitness to care for her four children forced Mayron to risk her life to have a fifth.
I met Mayron the day after she gave birth to a 1.5-pound baby girl. The day after, doctors scrambled to save her and the baby’s life. I spent the last year visualizing what life looks like caught inside a system of failed policies that have left Mayron and her family without food and diapers and at constant threat of eviction from their home, all while caring for the fragile life of her baby Elayna. This series of portraits expands our understanding of the complex history of control over women’s bodies by exploring what happens when women are forced to have babies without the resources and support to care for them.
