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."

Jennette Williams will receive a grant of $3,000, publication of a book of photography, an exhibition at Duke University, and inclusion in a Web site devoted to presenting the work of winners of the prize. Mary Ellen Mark will write the foreword to Williams's book, The Bathers, to be published in fall 2009 by Duke University Press in association with CDS Books of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.

"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."

Williams has a master's degree from Yale University and has been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, a Golden Light Award from the Maine Photographic Workshops, and grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at the Bonni Benrubi and Robert Mann galleries, New York; the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego; and the Photography Gallery at Florida International University, Miami. Her images have also been featured in such publications as Blind Spot, the New York Times Magazine, and the Village Voice, as well as in the book The Spirit of Family by Al and Tipper Gore. This collection of photographs of women bathers will be her first book.





Gallery



The Bathers: Photographs by Jennette Williams featured in the November 2009 podcast from Daylight magazine and on multimediamuse.org







Williams's work was selected from three hundred entries in the fourth biennial First Book Prize competition. Mary Ellen Mark also awarded honorable mentions to Jon Lowenstein of Chicago for his black-and-white images about the experiences of Mexican and Central American immigrants living in the United States and to Lucian Read of New York for his color photographs of Marines fighting on the frontlines of the war in Iraq.

Offered every other year, the Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize competition is open to American photographers of any age who have never published a book-length work and who use their cameras for creative exploration, whether it be of places, people, or communities; of the natural or social world; of beauty at large or the lack of it; of objective or subjective realities. The prize honors work that is visually compelling, that bears witness, and that has integrity of purpose.

Robert Frank, one of America's most influential photographers, judged the third biennial competition and chose Danny Wilcox Frazier for the prize because of his "passionate photo-graphs without sentimentality." Frazier's Driftless: Photographs from Iowa was a New York Photo Award finalist for Best Photography Book of the year.

Maria Morris Hambourg, founding curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Department of Photographs, chose Steven B. Smith to win the second competition for his black-and-white photographs of the surreal intersection of desert and suburbia in California, Utah, Nevada, and Colorado.

Renowned photographer Robert Adams, the prize's inaugural judge, selected Kansas-based photographer Larry Schwarm to win the first prize competition for his series of color images capturing dramatic prairie fires that take place in his native state each spring. Schwarm's On Fire is in its second printing.

The next First Book Prize in Photography competition will be held in 2010. For more information, see the CDS Web site at http://cds.aas.duke.edu/bp/index.html.

The Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) at Duke University teaches, engages in, and presents documentary work grounded in collaborative partnerships and extended fieldwork that uses photography, film/video, audio, and narrative writing to capture and convey contemporary memory, life, and culture. CDS values documentary work that balances community goals with individual artistic expression. CDS promotes documentary work that cultivates progressive change by amplifying voices, advancing human dignity, engendering respect among individuals, breaking down barriers to understanding, and illuminating social injustices. CDS conducts its work for local, regional, national, and international audiences.

The Honickman Foundation (THF) is dedicated to the support of projects that promote the arts, education, health, and social change. Embodied in this commitment is a fundamental belief in the power of the "family unit" and in the necessity of a strong community to support it. THF is dedicated to a variety of projects that strengthen and bolster both individuals and families. Though of disparate substance, what each project has in common is its creative potential. At the heart of the mission of The Honickman Foundation is the belief that creativity enriches contemporary society, because the arts are powerful tools for enlightenment, equity, and empowerment, and must be encouraged to effect social change as well as personal growth. To these ends The Honickman Foundation invests its time and resources.






banner image:

Budapest, 2002.

From The Bathers by Jennette Williams, winner of the fourth biennial Center for Documentary Studies / Honickman First Book Prize in Photography.



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