NOPA has received 40 applications for the 2009 Michael P. Smith Fund grant for documentary photography.
A three-person preliminary jury will be meeting in October to select up to 10 finalists, to be announced in late October. A selection of images from the finalists’ portfolios will be published on the NOPA website.
The preliminary jury members are Roy Flukinger, Chandra McCormick and Kevin Miller.
ROY FLUKINGER, the Research Curator of Photography at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin. He has published and lectured extensively in the fields of contemporary photography and the history of art and photography. To date he has produced or participated in nearly eighty exhibitions, including ”A Lewis Carroll Centenary” and ”Visiones de Tejanos/Visions of Texans”, as well as such traveling shows as ”Eve Arnold: In Retrospect” and ”The Formative Decades: Photography in Great Britain, 1839-1920”. Among his later publications are: ”Windows of Light” and ”Photography: The First 150 Years.”
CHANDRA McCORMICK is a documentary photographer who chronicles the sociocultural aspects of human life. Born in New Orleans (1957), her career background includes photography, activism and history, which has given her a unique capability to focus on a range of subjects not commonly covered by other documentary photographers. McCormick is renowned for capturing many different aspects of New Orleans culture, as well as the lifestyles of her fellow New Orleanians. In addition to documenting the city’s social and cultural history, McCormick has studied and documented religious ceremonies of the Spiritual Churches. She has also focused on African American laborers, such as sugarcane scrappers and sweet potato workers of rural Louisiana. She has produced an extensive body of work on Angola Prison, focusing on its incarcerated men and the impact of the prison system on their families; the work was featured in Aperture (Feb.2006).
KEVIN MILLER is the Director and Senior Curator of the Southeast Museum of Photography in Daytona, FL, on the campus of Dayton State College. It opened in 1992, and moved to a new facility (the Mori Hosseini Center) in 2007.The museum’s permanent collection has “more than 3,500 photographs and includes work by William Klein, Sally Mann, Harry Callahan, Gordon Parks, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Paul Strand, Aaron Siskind and Robert Rauschenberg.” It holds approximately 20 exhibitions per year.
JEFF L. ROSENHEIM, Curator in the Dept. of Photographs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC) will be the inaugural juror of the Michael P. Smith Fund for Documentary Photography (MPS Fund). The grant recipient will be announced during PhotoNOLA 09.
For more information contact Lori Waselchuk at MPSFund@neworleansphotoalliance.org