© Margeaux Walter
Project Presentations
CENTER highlights excellence and innovative contributions to the field each year with Award and Project Grant opportunities. As part of the career advancement packages, the selected photographers are invited to share an intimate view of their projects covering today’s most critical issues – climate change, immigration, gun violence, human trafficking, and suicide, among other topics.
Hosted online through Zoom and guided by a discussion and audience Q&A, thank you for joining us on September 13 - 15, and 22, with moderator Holly Stuart Hughes to learn more about the 2023 selected projects. Access the presentation recordings below.
Holly Stuart Hughes is an independent editor, writer, and grant consultant. The former editor-in-chief of PDN (Photo District News), she has organized panels and lectured on artists’ rights and the business of photography around the U.S., and served as a portfolio reviewer at several photo festivals. A graduate of Yale, she has written on photography and media for Time.com, The Telegraph, Multichannel News, Taschen Books, American Photographic Artists, Magnum Photos, Carlton Publishing, and Blouin ArtInfo Media.
“I am exploring ways to depict a disconnection with the landscape in reference to climate change denial through staged site-specific photography. Thinking about the notion of invisibility in the age of heightened surveillance, I have been conceptualizing works centered around how invisibility and denial feed into representations of climate change.”
Featured image - “Backstage” © Margeaux Walter
Don’t Be A Square • Margeaux Walter
2023 ENVIRONMENTAL AWARD
“My first exposure to suicide came at age 8, when my father made the first of several attempts to end his life. His fatal attempt came five years later, and I’ve been invested in the issue ever since. Growing up in Wyoming, I learned that suicide was an inescapable part of life in the American West. A number of subsequent suicides and attempts among my closest friends and family forced me to question why these tragedies were so commonplace in my beloved corner of the world.”
Featured image “Cresta, 69, holds a photo of herself with her friend Dave Moller, who died by suicide in 2012.” © Brandon Kapelow
Somewhere I Belong • Brandon Kapelow
2023 PROJECT DEVELOPMENT GRANT
“On November 5th, 2020, a landslide triggered by six days and nights of constant rain brought on by Hurricane Eta buried the village of Queja in San Cristobal Verapaz, Guatemala, along with an estimated 58 people. Within a few days, the municipality’s mayor, Ovidio Choc Pop, declared the area a “campo santo,” an uninhabitable graveyard ending all rescue efforts and recovering only eight bodies.”
Featured image - © Harvey Castro
Los Olvidados • Harvey Castro
2023 EXCELLENCE IN MULTIMEDIA STORYTELLING AWARD
Hosted on 12pm MT on September 14
“Since prehistoric times springs have been key to humanity’s survival. Unfortunately, arid and semi-arid land springs, and their supporting aquifers in North America are endangered and disappearing at a rate that continues to increase as the water crisis in the West prevails across lands that are the driest they have been in 1,200 years. Being an artist who is passionate about the water crisis and water scarcity in the West, I am drawn to their story as unseen yet essential details whose importance is misunderstood.”
Featured image - “Abandoned Cattle Watering Trough with Earth Crack on Hole-in-the-Wall Mormon Trail, Liston Seep, Colorado Plateau, UT” © Bremner Benedict
Hidden Waters, Arid Land Springs in the American West • Bremner Benedict
2023 PROJECT LAUNCH GRANT & REVIEW SANTA FE ALUMNA
“What does someone’s culture, heritage, and identity say about a person? This work began after a recent experience when my personal documents were deemed invalid because they held my married name and not my given name when I was first applying for a passport. I would need a picture ID of me as a child to prove my name and my identity. I was deeply hurt, in shock, and angered. It felt like erasure.”
Featured image - “Licensia Valida, Marriage License, cyanotype on corn husk” © Elizabeth Z. Pineda
Maíz • Elizabeth Z. Pineda
2023 PERSONAL AWARD
“At the core of this work resides the belief that visual storytelling has the power to change the world. Woman Rising is a multimedia and civic engagement project that strives to educate communities on the atrocity of human trafficking and encourage them to support survivors as they heal and rebuild their lives.”
Featured image - “Human trafficking survivor, Cary Stuart reveals a feather tattoo on her left wrist, she says, it’s a tattoo that covers up another tattoo her trafficker forced her to have with his name.” © Matilde Simas
Woman Rising: Surviving Human Trafficking • Matilde Simas
2023 BLUE EARTH FISCAL SPONSORSHIP
“Rage 4 Rights is an ongoing series documenting the controversial group Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights, and its dedication to the fight for equality and access to free/safe legal abortions available to all women in the United States through daring, nonviolent, disruptive protest that illuminate that rage women are feeling after Roe vs Wade was overturned.”
Featured image - © Mykle Parker
Rage 4 Rights • Mykle Parker
2023 ME&EVE GRANT
“800 still frames belong fully to the genre of fiction, with one frame being inspired by a true event. The plot is inspired by the true story of an amateur photographer who was shot dead as he took a picture of his family in 2011 that freeze-framed his killer and killer’s accomplice in the act, synchronously creating a once-in-a-lifetime photo (No 715). The film recontextualizes events that led to and proceeded his unbelievable photograph.”
Featured image - “No. 715” © Rocky McCorkle
Blazer • Rocky McCorkle
2023 SOCIAL AWARD & REVIEW SANTA FE ALUMNUS
© Bremner Benedict