Tag: Center For Documentary Studies

CDS/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography

Mary Ellen Mark has selected the winner of this years’ Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography. The “first book” aspect is in support of photographers for whom this is their first published book of work. Jennette Williams’s black-and-white photographs of women bathers was selected as the fourth title to be published through the Prize, which is awarded biennially. Previous winners include Larry Schwarm’s Prairie Fire work in 2003, Steven B. Smith’s series titled Constructed Landscapes of the American West, in 2005 and Danny Wilcox Frazier’s absolutely stunning photo-essay on rural Iowa.

On the depictive level, the work is straightforward and thoughtfully speaks to the physical realities of aging bodies. But coupled with her unassuming approach is an elegance and quietude that is half location—Eastern European and Turkish baths—and half observer. Avoiding obvious pitfalls—photographing nude women has many pitfalls—Williams offers the viewer a chance to reflect on the presence a physical body has in the world.

PRESS RELEASE:

Jennette Williams, a fine arts photography instructor at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, has been selected to receive the fourth Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography for her stunning platinum prints and color photographs of women at European and Turkish bath houses.

Celebrated photographer Mary Ellen Mark judged the competition and chose Williams for the prize because of her “original and beautifully rendered” photographs. “Jennette is both an excellent documentary photographer and a superb portraitist — a rare combination.” Mark also commented on the difficult decision she had to make, given the quality of the submissions. “It was a long and challenging process — especially knowing how much passion and work the photographers put into their projects.”

“What makes for beauty in women? How do we as a society perceive women as they age?” Williams writes of the bathers she portrays in these sublime and sensuous photographs. “I began with what were simple intentions. I wanted to photograph without sentiment or objectification women daring enough to stand, without embarrassment or excuse, before my camera and I wanted my photographs to be beautiful. . . . I drew upon classical gestures and poses from Titian, Ingres, and Pre-Raphaelites (to name a few) and utilized the platinum printing process to assure a sense of timelessness, as if the older or ‘normal’ woman has always been a subject of the arts.”

Jennette Williams is from New York City, and in 1994 she began making photographs of women attending exercise classes at the “once elegant, now dilapidated, indoor pool” on the Upper West Side of Manhattan where she took her children for swimming lessons. Eventually, she expanded the scope of her project “to include new sites and their bathing rites and rituals, to broaden the age range of the subjects, and to photograph the aging body usually (safely) covered from view.”

The Bathers will be published in Fall 2009 by Duke University Press in association with CDS Books of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.

Tags: Center For Documentary Studies, Jennette Williams
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