October 23 – December 31, 2024
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 recognize the honorable mentions for the Arnold Newman Prize.
Adam Ferguson – Big Sky
My mum was born in Yeoval, a farming village in regional Australia also known as the childhood home of Banjo Paterson, the famous Australian poet who romanticized life in the Australian bush. Every Christmas until my grandfather died, our family would hold a slide night where photographs displayed my grandmother, grandfather and their five daughters dressed in white English pomp for a country show or the horse races. As well as images of my great-grandparents on their wheat and sheep farm. These family memories became my own impressions of the Australian bush and of European settler identity.
My family history epitomizes a social fabric that once enmeshed the Australian Outback and its iconic bush towns. Pastoralism has been an integral part of its history, transforming the region’s environment, culture, workforce, and driving the national economy. The realities of the bush however are complex and layered. The country’s occupation and colonial legacy has caused a deep dispossession of first-nation traditional custodians from their lands, language and culture, and severe degradation of the land.
In recent years globalizing forces such as the centralisation of business, a transition to large-scale mining, the mechanization of farming and a population shift to larger regional centers is reshaping the environmental and cultural landscape of Australia’s outback. The country has also experienced the gamut of extreme weather linked to climate change – bushfires, flooding and drought. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, by the end of the century drought will become more common and severe across the planet’s midlatitudes and the subtropics. Australia’s changing landscape is a harbinger of things to come.
Big Sky is both a photographic survey of Australia’s heartland and a response to it’s climate crisis. Through environmental portraiture and formal landscape photography (not included in this submission of portraits) I observe fading yet iconic events, shrinking small-towns, Aboriginal connection to Country, pastoralism, and mining. By presenting a vivid account of Australia in the Anthropocene I attempt to challenge and position archetypal tropes of the Australian identity with the complex realities of contemporary life in the Outback.
Constance Jaeggi – Escaramuza, the Poetics of Home
Escaramuza, The Poetics of Home considers the Mexican tradition of escaramuza, all-female precision horse riding teams who execute exacting maneuvers while riding sidesaddle at high speed and wearing traditional Mexican attire. Widespread in Mexico, escaramuza is becoming increasingly established in the United States. This work pairs my photographic portraits of US- based escaramuzas with specially commissioned poetry by the Mexican American poets Ire’ne Lara Silva and Angelina Sàenz. In addition, it features mixed media works that highlight excerpts from my extensive interviews with the riders.
These interviews give a broader sense of the escaramuzas’ experiences as women in charrería culture, and either as immigrants, or as first-, second-, or third-generation Americans. The predominantly male national sport of Mexico, charrería emerged from early Mexican cattle ranching activities and was eventually refined and formalized during the post-revolutionary era as a romantic, nationalist expression of lo mexicano (Mexicanness). The escaramuzas speak of the sometimes-frustrating machismo that they have to navigate within their sport. In my photographs I seek to respond to this frustration, to capture the grace and dignity of these women, while reckoning with the gendered complexities of escaramuza within the charrería tradition. Notably, all the women are photographed in formal escaramuza dress—ornate and handcrafted garments that are in many ways emblematic of the social and cultural dimensions, as well as tensions, in their stories. They present themselves formally, and in this sense suggest a certain rigidity and strictness within the tradition. But this formality also describes the escaramuzas’ immense discipline, skill, and precision as riders. Moreover, the beauty of their garments is celebratory and expressive, speaking to the individual and their subjectivity, as well as to the profound sense of belonging that the tradition of escaramuza collectively holds for its practitioners.
My portraits seek to amplify empowerment, and I believe the subjects’ gaze to be central to this. The women confront the camera and own the spaces that they occupy. These choices are significant, as I’ve photographed the escaramuzas within the landscape that, historically, has been the privileged domain of the white male. Given this, escaramuza may be said to represent women’s reclamation of that space, of their right to coexist within it, and to refuse to be confined to the domestic sphere. For all its tradition and formality, I believe that escaramuza is a powerful force for the disruption of established gender roles in charrería.
This sense of defiance—evident above all in the escaramuzas’ dress, location, and pose—is my point of connection to these women. It is where I am present in the work, and the meeting of our gazes in the act of photographing pinpoints this precisely. My lens is a feminist one, and Escaramuza, The Poetics of Home is a feminist project. Specifically, it is a collaborative work between myself, the escaramuzas, and the poets, Ire’ne Lara Silva and Angelina Sàenz, whom I have invited to create prose in response to my images. Ire’ne’s and Angelina’s contributions amplify the voices of the women I’ve photographed, contextualizing their experiences through poetic language.
In addition to photography, the aforementioned mixed media works reaffirm the connection of the tradition of escaramuza to the history of the soldaderas, female fighters in the Mexican Revolution. I’ve colorized gelatin silver prints of historic photographs of soldaderas from the revolutionary era. Similarly to my photographic portraits of the escaramuzas, the soldaderas confront the camera with their gazes. Many of these historical images are of both male and female soldiers. I have chosen to colorize only the women, returning them to life, as such stripping away the nostalgia that is inherent in black and white depiction, bringing greater subjectivity to their portraits. These colorized works are layered with sheer silk onto which are printed excerpts from the interviews I have conducted with the escaramuzas, conceptually merging past to present histories.
Barbara Bosworth – Birds and Other Angels
Birds, to me, are wonderment. A flash of color, a song. I love listening to and looking at birds. Poets and songwriters have rejoiced in the songs of birds since Homer. In painting and literature they have been thought of as messengers from Heaven.
These photographs were taken using an 8×10 film camera while working with bird banders during the annual spring migration. Bird banding is a method of observing birds, providing conservationists and ornithologists with information to protect birds and vital habitat. The researchers catch and then release the birds for the purpose of gathering data to study their behavior, monitor the population and to track migration routes. This data is used for both scientific research and conservation projects and provides a barometer for measuring the health of our natural ecosystems. With the increasingly obvious effect of humans on the course of nature, birds are an important link to understanding our impact.
The first image that entranced me as a child was a print from the 1930’s that hung on my bedroom wall as it had on my father’s childhood wall before me. It was of a young girl sitting, turned backwards on a bench in the woods looking up into a birch tree next to her, looking up at a robin. She was so close she could have reached out and touched it.
Later in life I learned of the paintings of Fra Angelico. In them I saw saints, palms turned toward heaven, at times it seemed reaching for the void, just reaching.
When my mother was failing with Parkinson’s and the dementia had its hold, she would reach out, upwards, as if to hold onto something from heaven. I asked her what she was reaching for she replied Oh! The birds!
And, like the young blind girl in Andre Gide’s story called The Pastoral Symphony, I believe that the songs of the birds are sounds made by the sunlight; from the warmth it gave her skin she believed the air could sing.
Birds open our hearts.
Reaching out, holding on, letting go is what these pictures are about. About loving and losing. I can still see my mother sitting, reaching skyward, heavenward, reaching for the birds.
Stas Ginzburg – Sanctuary
For the past four years, I have been making portraits of the LGBTQ+ community during various marches and rallies advocating for the liberation and equality of all oppressed and marginalized peoples. My new series, titled Sanctuary, shifts my focus from the streets to the homes of queer, trans, and non-binary individuals, where they are free to exist in their truth, away from the threat of police violence and the external homophobia and transphobia that still permeate our society.
In these new intimate portraits, I highlight the diversity of the queer and trans experience. Abby is the first transgender rabbi and activist from New York City. John is a bisexual young man from Ohio who lost his left eye due to police violence. Jermaine is a queer disabled organizer born with cerebral palsy who rallied hundreds of people to march in support of Black disabled lives in 2020 and 2021. Jeremy fled gender-based violence in their hometown of New Mexico and now lives in a van along the California coast. Pamela is a transgender Latinx sex worker living in Jackson Heights, Queens.
To create these portraits, I spend time with each individual in their living space, engaging in conversations to build trust and understanding. This approach allows me to capture authentic moments that reflect their true selves and the environments they have crafted, giving the viewer an intimate look into the bedrooms and living rooms of the LGBTQIA+ community. The environments become as important as the people, creating an archive of objects and memorabilia that continue to tell the narrative of the queer and trans experience.
My long-term goal for this project is to present it in book form and as a traveling exhibition. I want people from all walks of life to engage with these diverse perspectives of human existence. At this critical time in our country, when trans healthcare and well-being are continuously threatened by legislation, and homophobia still runs rampant even in large metropolitan areas, it is essential for this community representation to exist and be seen.
Sara J. Winston – “Our Body is a Clock”
“Our body is a clock” is a hybrid visual-textual book project of self-portrait photographs made during monthly intravenous medical infusion treatments which started in 2015 to treat Multiple Sclerosis. I make tableaus capturing moments with nurses, my spouse, my mother, my daughter, or in solitude, always against the backdrop of medical care–my IV, bandages, or blood, and the starkness of clinical settings–which juxtapose my appearance of an able bodied young person. Not enough is shown of multiple sclerosis or chronic illness in the mainstream.
The complexities of care and caregiving, and the unfortunate reality that medical care is not a basic human right under the American medical industrial system model have led me to wonder: What does a life of indefinite medicalization look like? And, How do I contend with and accept that reality? Our body is a clock is one way I manage the emotional house of cards tied to disability in a society that lacks an adequate social safety net.
The book will include a conversation between artist Moyra Davey and myself about living with Multiple Sclerosis, a selection from the 13,000 photographs that make up this project, and short pieces of writing that describe the physical and emotional impact of treatment, the curiosity and blurry boundaries of the patient and medical practitioner relationship, and the psychological space of sickness in the American healthcare system.
An excerpt of this project was adapted as an op-ed for the New York Times that was published in June of 2023. That piece is included in this packet. After it was published I received several hundred emails from people who felt heard, seen, empowered, and hungry to connect with another person who might either help translate their complex experience of illness and healthcare into clear language, or, possibly help them find their way through the system.
When I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis I was desperate to find examples of photographers depicting their experience of chronic illness by turning the lens back on themselves. I could not find the work I sought. Once I made the decision to use a tripod, a remote, and a professional camera to photograph myself while receiving medical treatment, the result was a type of photograph I had not seen before.
Leonard Suryajaya – Parting Gift
Parting Gift (currently in progress) is a photographic series that tells a complex story of citizenship renunciation, perseverance, and generational trauma, bound together by a language of love, family, and community. After 18 years in America, I decided to become a naturalized U.S. citizen this year, even despite the rise of fascism. This process will take about two years. Because Indonesia doesn’t recognize dual citizenship, I’d like to make this project my parting gift. Last year, Indonesia passed a law prohibiting extra-marital sex and cohabitation outside of marriage, and the society grows increasingly anti-LGBT. Inspired by these recent developments, I choose to spend six months there with my white, American husband. I’d like to set up a studio practice and face my fears of being an openly queer visual artist and thinker in conservative Indonesia. I am willing to take these risks in order to inspire new perspectives on love, family, and community. Building upon the works and visual language I’ve developed throughout my career, this new project will also facilitate conversations on home, allegiance, belonging, and our collective futures. I will enlist myself, family, friends, and communities in affectionate and fantastical tableaux exploring themes of migration, agony, healing, and camaraderie. The works will be presented in a photo book and in visual art exhibitions that examine sociocultural tensions around identity, acceptance, and kinship from the perspective of a queer Chinese Indonesian immigrant in the United States.
As a second-generation Chinese Indonesian, I grew up a second-class citizen during a period when Chinese culture, language, customs, and identity was banned. I was raised in a Buddhist household and educated in Catholic and Christian schools in the largest Islamic majority country in the world. The discovery of my queerness in an extremely conservative setting further prompted me to move to America. Through perseverance, practice, and passion, I’ve developed a visual language that’s fantastical yet tender, bursting with colors and patterns, meanings, and confusions. I employ the large-format film camera, but unlike Gregory Crewdson’s ambitious movie-set process, my approach is more like a Do-It-Yourself community production of absurdist theatre featuring family, friends, and community. I am the facilitator, photographer, set designer, creative director, and choreographer. The picture frame is my stage and I fill it with humble everyday objects and subjects to find a sense of order in chaos.
Parting Gift takes an original approach in acknowledging the ethnic cleansing towards Chinese minority in Indonesia through a perspective of queerness. The work comprises of tableaux, portraits, self-portraiture, still life, personal family photos and official documents connecting the experience of fleeing and searching for the definition of home. The work is imaginative in the way that it subverts trauma, persecution and dehumanization with perseverance and beauty through the language of family and community. Addressing themes of loss, trauma, family, migration and queerness, the project uses humor, purposeful confusion, role playing and group camaraderie in elaborately staged photographs to inspire new perspectives on love and belonging. The project tells a story of resilience as it challenges the use of identity, family, and community as political weapons to limit, erase and oppress human’s fundamental rights. Furthermore, the project defies the use of AI powered image making and manipulation by employing the human-centered large format photographic process as a mode of portraiture and storytelling.
