Application Guidelines
About the Scholarship
The John Chervinsky Emerging Photographer Scholarship seeks to recognize, encourage and reward photographers with the potential to create a body of work and sustain solo exhibitions. Awarded annually, the Scholarship provides recipients with a monetary award of $3,000, exhibition of their work at the Griffin Museum of Photography, and a volume from John’s personal library of photography books. The Scholarship seeks to provide a watershed moment in the professional lives of emerging photographers, providing them with the support and encouragement necessary to develop, articulate and grow their own vision for photography.
Eligibility Criteria
The scholarship is open to photographers who have produced individual works of photography and/or are in the process of producing bodies of work.
We are looking for candidates who are serious about photography, whose potential is emerging and whose photography will benefit from this scholarship. Candidates should not be currently enrolled in a photography degree program. There is no age limit. There are no residency requirements.
Photographers without gallery representation who have not exhibited solo in a gallery/museum setting or have not received significant (over $3000) grant funding are eligible (coffee shop, community gallery, library etc. are eligible exhibition settings). Past awardees of the Chervinsky Scholarship, paid employees of the Griffin Museum or their immediate families, Griffin Museum board members and jurors’ immediate families and those Griffin board members or jurors’ paid employees are not eligible.
This scholarship is not for well-established photographers. Well-established photographers are individuals in mid-photography-careers and are seen by the public and peers as distinguished in the field of photography and have many accomplishments as a photographer. Please note again that an artist who has had SOLO exhibitions in established galleries/museums or has gallery representation or received significant grant funding (over $3000) will be considered too accomplished to receive this scholarship.
Submissions
Submissions may be made directly to the Griffin Museum gateway only (See below). You will be asked for a brief biography and artistic cv (a single pdf that includes both bio and cv); a statement of artistic purpose/intent; a statement on the work supplied, and flattened rgb jpgs (1200 pixels on the longest side) of your photographs (minimum of 10/maximum of 14 photographs). Naming convention is firstname-lastname-title.jpg.
Do not supply links. Our gateway will assemble your input into one area on our web host site and give the jurors the ability to go there to view and also download a pdf as needed. You will be able to insert text for artistic statement and project statement in the gateway application. No other means of submission will be accepted. All missing criteria will disqualify the submission. Emails will not be accepted as a method of submissions. It is recommended that great thought and effort be put into the artistic purpose/intent statement (see sample supplied).
Scholarship Dates and Deadlines
August 1, 2018: Application period opens. Apply Here
September 5, 2018: Application period closes
1st week in January 2019: Announcement of 2018 scholarship recipient
September 11, 2018: 2017 Awardee exhibition
John Chervinsky Emerging Photographer Scholarship awards 2017 Press Release
2018 Jurors
Crista Dix
2017 Jurors
Jay Gould
The 2017 award for the John Chervinsky Emerging Scholarship will go to photographer Rachel Fein-Smolinski
The judges, said, “We are pleased to award the 2017 John Chervinsky Scholarship to Rachel Fein-Smolinski. Rachel’s plunge into science-and-visual-expression, her experimentation with imagery and presentation in the service of her ideas, and a special energy all come through in her uniquely provocative work. While not a requirement of this award, and quite different in form, she and John share the spirit of scientific inquiry, making this all the sweeter.”
Fein-Smolinski submitted The Infinite Internal for consideration for the scholarship. Fein-Smolinski says of the body of work:
“The Infinite Internal has three chapters: “The Sex Lives of Animals without Backbones”, “A Science of Desirable/Detestable Bodies”, and “The Prosthetic Practice for the Healing of Imaginary Wounds” that integrate disparate imagery, from highly stylized documents, photographs, videos of dissections, and sourced diagrams from scientific education materials used to create spaces that probe the relationship that intellectualism has with authority, gender, sexuality, and psychology. Intellectualism has historically been a saving grace for disenfranchised cultural groups, heavily associated with people of Jewish descent and those who identify as women. As someone who is both of those things, I have been carrying out my own experiments, spending time with DIY scientists and creating installation spaces that visualize science fiction stories of DIY biology and medical procedures that appropriate the authority of the bio-medical field. I print large format images created through microscopy and coat them in resin. Resin being a substance that is used in the preservation of organisms. I use clinical lighting like x-ray viewing machines to show transparencies that I produce in the darkroom on lith-film from archival scientific educational slides, carry out at home dissections of organs and organisms, grow crystals which I document via time-lapse, use alternative printing processes that reference the history of women in science like cyanotypes referencing Anna Atkins botany prints and black and white documentation of physical principles appropriated from an archive of scientific educational slides, referencing Berenice Abbot’ s work producing images for MIT’s Physics department. A vital aspect of this work is the installations, which address the images as objects themselves, amongst a world of objects that hold visual pleasure on the same level as intellectual rigor, using institutional, experimental, educational, and commercial display methods.”
Rachel Fein-Smolinski’s Statement of Purpose:
“My work is about pleasure, neurosis, objectivity and subjectivity. It is about the visceral and visual satisfaction associated with the history of the documentation and depiction of bio- medical phenomena. I use a mixture of the visual indulgence of high commerce, the sacred and compulsive laboratory space, and the expansive mode of science fiction and its ability to appropriate the authority of knowledge to create speculative installation spaces in the visual field. I look at what the relationship between neurosis, intelligence, subjectivity, objectivity and visual indulgence is within the history of the pursuit of knowledge.
The history of science has held fast to the aesthetic of objective authority, with observation as the primary source of knowledge in scientific inquiry. I scrutinize the bio-medical and techno-scientific gaze, using its authority to create discreet objects, incorporating photography, video and sculpture to search for the neurotic impetus within the fields of intellectual pursuit.
I use an alter-ego, a caricature of a neurotic, intellectual hero, constructed from cultural signifiers, as a Jewish woman, raised with a cultural identity that idealizes intellect to the point of fetishization. This is a stylized performance of a masculine archetype (yes, I am exploring what it means to be a woman through the usage of masculinity and its historical relationship to authority) used in science fiction, tv doctor dramas, and retellings of the histories of technological advancement. Intellectual inquiry is a socially acceptable form of obsessive, and scopophilic (visually indulgent) behavior. It is a space where unhealthy impulses are sublimated into the field of intellectual pursuit. All is forgiven if the hero’s brilliance outshines their character flaws.
Bio-medical exploration is a fantasy of constant visibility. To see is to know, and to know is to succeed. With techniques like dissections, bodies are eviscerated so that the spectator can incorporate the sight of the others’ internal organs into their own body of knowledge. Or microscopy, where an imaging apparatus is used to augment the viewer’s vision in order to look at, and infer new knowledge from, otherwise invisible mechanisms, ideally infinitely. However, as there is no such thing as a purely objective gaze—observation is always tied to a host of psychological associations. To see is to concurrently project and consume. Through this play-acting of biological experiments and procedures, I tease out the role of visual pleasure in intellectual inquiry, resulting in installation spaces that reproduce the clinical, experimental, and educational. In this way, I explore what Foucault described in his 1963 book The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, as “…that region of ‘subjective symptoms’ that—for the doctor—defines not the mode of knowledge, but the world of objects to be known.” ”
Image above of John Chervinsky © L. Barry Hetherington
