The CENTER Awards

The CENTER Awards recognize outstanding images, singular or part of a series, in three categories: Personal, Social, and Environmental. We are adding to our database and archive of lens-based work from the last 30 years and invite you to contribute. This archive includes submissions from photographers from all over the world and is available to digital scholars and researchers. All applicant’s work will remain in the CENTER archive, regardless of award status.

A broad and inclusive interpretation of the themes is encouraged:
• The PERSONAL AWARD recognizes work engaging in the exploration and expression of the power of self-representation and/or underrepresented experiences.
• The SOCIALLY ENGAGED AWARD recognizes work addressing social issues. All projects exploring social topics or themes are eligible.
• The ENVIRONMENTAL AWARD recognizes work focusing on the state of the ecological environment. Topics may include but are not limited to, conservation, biodiversity, ecology, climate change, or other issues concerning the natural world. All projects exploring ecological relationships, topics, or themes are eligible.

PROJECT ADVANCEMENT PACKAGE
• Winners Exhibition at the Turchin Center for the Visual Arts
• Review Santa Fe Admission
• Public Project Presentation
• Featured Publication in LENSCRATCH
• Professional Development Seminars
• Inclusion in the CENTER Winners Gallery & Archive

Matthew Finley • An Impossibly Normal Life

“With few examples of happy, out queer lives to look back on before the 1970s, and even less visual evidence of them, I am creating an alternate world narrative for the uncle I didn’t know I had. A life story where fluidity in sexuality and gender are the norm. A life full of acceptance, friends and adventure. A life I would have benefited from knowing as a young, struggling gay man. Where who you love is immaterial. What’s important is that you love.”

2024 Personal Award Recipient

Sofie Hecht • A Matter of When: Stories of New Mexico's Downwinders

“Detonated in Southern New Mexico on July 16, 1945, Trinity’s residual fallout traveled as far as Canada, Mexico, and 46 U.S. states. Half a million people lived within the primary 150 square-mile radiation zone of the world’s first atomic bomb. 78 years later, the legacy of Trinity lives on in astounding rates of cancer and illness in these communities. Downwind uses archival materiality—from family photographs, letters, documents, interviews—to represent the deterioration of land and bodies exposed to radiation. It tells these stories through portraits, oral histories, and a decaying family archive. As the archive itself shows signs of aging within an environment exposed to radiation, so too do the Downwinders.”

2024 Socially Engaged Award Recipient

John Trotter • No Agua, No Vida: The Human Alteration of the Colorado River

“As the climate change emergency continues to shrink the Colorado River, the only hope for mitigating the inevitable suffering for more than 40 million people directly dependent on the river’s water will be cooperation informed by a better understanding of the system’s totality. Though exploitation of the river has created animosity between its users since even before the 1922 Compact, the stakes have never been higher.”

2024 Environmental Award Recipient

2024 Jurors

Personal Award • Kristen Gresh, Ph.D.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Socially Engaged Award • Noelle Flores Théard

The New Yorker
Environmental Award • Sabine Meyer

National Audubon Society

Kristen Gresh, Ph.D., is the Estrellita and Yousuf Karsh Senior Curator of Photographs at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA). At the MFA, her exhibitions have included "Life Magazine and the Power of Photography" (co-organized with Princeton University Art Museum), "Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico" and "She Who Tells a Story: Women Photographers from Iran and the Arab World," of which she was the author of the exhibitions’ companion publications. Other publications include "Viewpoints: Photographs from the Howard Greenberg Collection" (2019), and contributions to "Ruth Orkin: A Photo Spirit" (2021), "The New Woman Behind the Camera" (2020), and "Une histoire mondiale des femmes photographes" (2020). Previously, Gresh worked as curator and taught history of photography in Cairo and Paris, where she did her Ph.D. dissertation at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.

Noelle Flores Théard has been the Senior Digital Photo Editor at The New Yorker since 2021. She was the program officer at Magnum Foundation from 2016 to 2021, and is a co-founder of FotoKonbit, a nonprofit organization created in 2010 to engage and support Haitians telling their own stories through photography.

Sabine Meyer is the Photography Director for the National Audubon Society, where she oversees the conservation’s group visual identity. She has worked for a range of publications and non-profit organizations. Sabine is an affiliate with the International League of Conservation Photographers (iLCP) and served on the faculty at the School of the International Center of Photography, where she taught photo editing for more than a decade. She also spent seven years as the co-director and curator of Fovea Exhibitions, a Beacon, New York–based nonprofit advocating visual literacy through photojournalism and documentary photography.