The 2022 grants focus on research and scholarship that seeks to fill gaps and provide missing information in the history of women and photobooks with a focus on Asia, Africa and Oceania. Working with Dayanita Singh, we have added a grant for researchers living in South Asia. We continue to be extremely impressed with the range and strength of submissions which further evidences the need and opportunity for more research into the history of the photobook and the many stories and topics yet to be well known.
The three recipients of the 2022 Research Grants on Photobook History were:
Sunyoung Kim
Unraveling women’s stories on the page: The advent of women’s magazines in the 1960s in S. Korea
Lin Junye
Women behind the pages: dialogues in photobook-making from Southeast Asia through editing, designing and self-publishing
Suryanandini Narain
Visualising Home: Domestic Visual Culture in India, with a focus on family albums as photobooks preserved by middle-class women
Many thanks to our jurors, Anshika Varma, Ben Krewinkel and Daniel Boetker-Smith for their work in reviewing and considering the many proposals.
View video of 2022 Research Grantee Presentations.
The jurors’ commented on the winners:
- The three selected proposals seek to expand not only the history of women practitioners in different parts of the world, but also on the life and format of what is understood as the photobook itself. All these projects show a desire to understand and create records for more contemporary understandings of the book.
- I’m looking forward to the new insights Sunyoung Kim’s research will provide into the work of female South Korean photographers and their hard efforts getting their work published in magazines in the 1960s.
- By having conversations with different bookmakers, viewed from the perspective of specific roles they occupy, Lin Junye will offer in-depth insights into a variety of aspects in the practice of bookmaking in Southeast Asia, something I can’t remember having read about before. Lin Junye’s research is an important study in the growing practice of independent publishing in Southeast Asia and I am certain her conversations with many practitioners is critical to create a record of a very important time in publishing from the region.
- One of the many fascinating aspects of Suryanandini Narain’s research is how she will link the role of the physical photo album to the way in which women in the Indian middle class shape their identity and position within patriarchal family life. Through Suryanandini’s work with the 50 women who are builders of their family albums, the position and historicity of the medium is centered to the form of this ephemera, responding to social structures under which the photo album is also the photobook.
The 2022 Jurors:
Anshika Varma is a photographer, editor, curator and publisher with an interest in personal, collective and mythical histories. She is the founder of Offset Projects, an artist-led initiative in New Delhi, India, that works to create channels of engagement in photography and book-making through workshops, residencies, artist talks, pop-up reading rooms and collaborative exercises in publishing. Combining her curiosity to study cultural and social evolution with storytelling, her work often looks at the emotional connection between the individual and their environment. Varma’s works and curations have been part of exhibitions, festivals and panel conversations at Fotomuseum Winterthur, Photo Kathmandu, Chennai Photo Biennale. She has been invited to speak within educational institutions and festival programming on subjects of photography, publishing and the growth of the visual language in South Asia and continues to teach on these subjects at institutions such as YaleNUS (Singapore), Photography Studies College (Melbourne) and Ashoka University (India). Her writing has been part of publications such as Aperture, Photobooks& and the Alkazi Foundation. Her practice is defined through processes of collective participation and creation of work separate from institutional systems.
Ben Krewinkel studied modern African history in Amsterdam and Pretoria. He wrote a thesis on the role women played in the liberation struggle of Mozambique. He subsequently studied documentary photography at the Fotoacademie in Amsterdam where he graduated cum laude with a series on how people were trained as nurses to combat HIV in Venda, South Africa. He published two photobooks: A Possible Life (2012) and Looking for M. (2014). He also holds a M.A. in Photographic Studies from Leiden University for which he wrote a thesis on the photographic representation of the “Poor Whites” in South Africa in the 20th century. He teaches photography and research practices at the HU University of Applied Sciences and has taught at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. Krewinkel is also a curator and book designer, and worked with artists like Bertien van Manen, Geert van Kesteren, Ringel Goslinga, Koos Breukel, Cynthia Boll and Dana Lixenberg. As a judge he is involved in the Eiger Foundation African Photobook of the Year Award, the CAP Prize and he is a member of the commission for Documentary Photography at the Stadsarchief Amsterdam. Currently, he is working on a long-term project “Africa in the Photobook,” about the changing visual representation of Africa as expressed through the medium of the photobook. This project started with the open platform by the same name and is about to be published as a book in collaboration with delpire & co.
Daniel Boetker-Smith is an educator, writer, curator, publisher and the Dean of Studies at Photography Studies College (Melbourne). He is also the Director of the Asia-Pacific Photobook Archive, a not-for-profit library of self-published and independent photobooks. Daniel regularly speaks at festivals and symposia internationally on the subject of photobooks, photographic publishing and self-publishing in the Asia-Pacific area. In 2021 he co-curated the major international exhibition Not Standing Still: new approaches in documentary photography at the Monash Gallery of Art for the Photo 2021 Festival in Melbourne, Australia. He is a regular writer and contributor to the British Journal of Photography, FOAM Magazine, GUP Magazine, European Photography, Voices of Photography, Vault, photo-eye, Paper Journal, Heavy, Source, and other Australian and international publications. He was previously Managing Editor of Photofile magazine, and more recently, Head of the Peer Review Panel for OVER: The Critical Journal of Photography and Visual Culture, published by Photo Ireland.
10×10’s Research Grants for 2022 are generously supported by an anonymous donor and by Dayanita Singh.