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.

– Adam Ferguson

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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.

– Constance Jaeggi

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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.

– Barbara Bosworth

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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.

– Stas Ginzburg

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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.

– Sara J. Winston

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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.

– Leonard Suryajaya

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.

– Cheryl Mukherji

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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.

– Preston Gannaway

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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.

– Stacy Kranitz