Congratulations to Robert Pluma for being selected for CENTER’s Excellence in Multimedia Storytelling Award recognizing his project, Hidden Histories of San Antonio. The Excellence in Multimedia Storytelling Award recognizes outstanding storytellers using lens-based media to create narrative-driven projects. The award is open, but not limited to, photography, video, new media, photojournalism, installation, and web-based works.
Robert Pluma is the recipient of the 2024 Multimedia Award. His project, Hidden Histories of San Antonio, reexamines the stories many thought we knew and shows how our understanding can be significantly deepened when viewing them through a different lens. At its best, multimedia can engage the audience to understand a story in a deeper, more profound way, and Pluma’s project interweaves his own family’s story with portraiture, testimony, and 3D scanning of primary objects to retell this historical narrative in a fresh way. Hidden Histories of San Antonio was in some ways the most ambitious project submitted from a multimedia perspective, but what drew me into it was seeing how Pluma’s explanation centered the participants—the most important part of any narrative.
The book is a personal collection of a life lived, a scrapbook that contains the dichotomy of two worlds: the innocence of circumstance and the visual acknowledgment of colliding cultures, that include race and privilege. The artist simply documented her world and the people in it. – Aline Smithson Rotan Switch is the first monograph
Rotan Switch documents life on my grandparents’ cotton farm in the Arkansas Delta community of Rotan, which takes its name from the community’s central landmark—the railroad switch where farmers loaded their cotton bales onto trains headed out of the Delta. Although it hasn’t been used in years, it remains a potent symbol of the complex intersections of industry and agriculture, of race and injustice.
Peter van Agtmael is a documentary photographer based in NY. Since 2006 he has concentrated on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is a member of Magnum Photos
Congratulations to Austin Bryant for being selected for CENTER’s Project Launch Grant recognizing his project, Where They Still Remain. The Project Launch Grant supports a complete or nearly completed documentary or fine art series. The grant provides financial support and platforms for professional development opportunities for one photographer. The Grant includes a $5,000 cash award,
Where They Still Remain is a project that focuses on the African American and Wampanoag indigenous communities who have coexisted for hundreds of years on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, off the coast of Massachusetts. The work is a memorial to these people, past and present. In it, I attempt to make the unseen seen by shining a light on histories lost due to erasure. The work consists of my original photography (medium + large format film), vernacular/archival images from both communities, and historical texts that I’ve redacted. My connection to the work is direct—I am part of the historical tradition of African American families who have found a safe haven on the island since before Emancipation.
The image provenance system will soon be available as an option to “those who require a photo editing workflow that is compliant with the C2PA standard.”
Tucked at the bottom of its GFX 100S II announcement, Fujifilm says that it is joining the Content Authenticity Initiative to bring verification to its interchangeable lens series cameras.
In Kholood Eid’s photographs of Missouri, taken six months into the war in Gaza, the quiet act of documenting life is a kind of protest against erasure.
Intimaa’s portrait is followed by a photo of her passport, issued by the Palestinian Authority. Together, these images evoke a longing that we in the diaspora feel for Palestine. Every student who manages to leave Gaza knows that she may not be able to go back. “Loss brought her to this country,” Eid told me, of Intimaa. “She continues to experience tremendous loss.” Since October, Intimaa’s other grandmother and two of her brothers have been killed, along with their wives and children. In the background of an audio message from one of her sisters who is still in Gaza, she could hear people screaming
Documenting his journey from Oakland to attend the historic March on Washington, Kamal X’s monochrome images capture the love, power and strength of 2020’s charged summer of Black Lives Matter protests
Documenting his journey from Oakland to attend the historic March on Washington, Kamal X’s monochrome images capture the love, power and strength of 2020’s charged summer of Black Lives Matter protests.
In the liminal space between mountains and rivers, Yan Sun creates images suffused with Chinese history, renewing the subjects of traditional painting with his contemporary photographic observation
In the liminal space between mountains and rivers, Yan Sun creates images suffused with Chinese history, renewing the subjects of traditional painting with his contemporary photographic observation.
That’s also why I struggle to exhibit the work. It needs to be seen as a book because a collection of photographs on the wall doesn’t do it. You need to see it as this package with the poor images, the imperfect, the perfect. With that packaging I feel satisfied that I communicated what I needed to communicate. But there will be more. It’s to be continued. It’s happening. It’s still coming for me. I haven’t said everything.
We are re-running last year’s MOTHER exhibition, just for fun! What a complete pleasure to spend time with your hundreds of submissions and see all the considerations of MOTHER. Thank you for joining in this 5 part exhibition, so keep scrolling. For those who celebrate, Happy Mother’s Day, and for those who don’t, thank you
What a complete pleasure to spend time with your hundreds of submissions and see all the considerations of MOTHER. Thank you for joining in this 5 part exhibition, so keep scrolling. For those who celebrate, Happy Mother’s Day, and for those who don’t, thank you for celebrating Mother nature and mothering in the animal world. No matter, enjoy the exhibition!
Copyright holders can claim damages for copyright infringements that occurred years or even decades ago, the U.S. Supreme Court has clarified. In a majority decision, the Court rejected the lower court’s argument that there’s a three-year time limit for damages. Older claims are fair game, as long as the lawsuit is filed within three years of ‘discovering’ an infringement.
(Stranger Fruit by Jon Henry published by Monolith Editions. Stranger Fruit sold out in six weeks, and went into a second edition, with solo shows at Abakus Projects, UCR Arts and Photographic Center Northwest, and press including, the Boston Globe, Hyperallergic, Dazed UK, the Gaudian and selected as one of the best photo books of
The interesting books design an experience that is rooted in the projects concept and narrative. The design language echoes the content and clarifies and strengthens the work. Every detail contributes to the experiential arc.
She may be America’s foremost social documentary photographer, now with a survey at the Museum of Modern Art. “All I’m doing is showing up as a vessel.”
She may be America’s foremost social documentary photographer, now with a survey at the Museum of Modern Art. “All I’m doing is showing up as a vessel.”
Bedford Gallery has recently opened its latest exhibition, Re-Discovering Native America: Stories in Motion with The Red Road Project, a photo-docuseries which highlights and celebrates inspiring stories of present-day NativeAmerican individuals and communities by providing a platform for them to tell their stories of the past, present, and future in their own voices and words
Since founding the Red Road Project in 2013, multicultural friend-and-artist duo Danielle SeeWalker (Hunkpapa and Oglala Lakota) and Carlotta Cardana, who was born and raised in Northern Italy, have been committed to documenting the stories and teachings of contemporary Native people and communities who are enacting positive change and celebrating their cultural heritage despite the long, complicated historical trauma faced by Indigenous communities in the United