Center for Photography at Woodstock Announces 2024 CPW Vision Awards Honorees

Center for Photography at Woodstock Announces 2024 CPW Vision Awards Honorees

Kingston, NY, March 13, 2024–The Center for Photography at Woodstock (CPW) is proud to announce the recipients of its 2024 Vision Awards. Each of the honorees has had a significant impact on the field of photography, and will be celebrated in person at a dinner event on April 20, in CPW’s new headquarters at 25 Dederick Street in Kingston. These are the honorees: 

Lifetime Achievement: Nan Goldin
Photographer of the Year: An-My Lê
Saltzman Prize for Emerging Photographer: Keisha Scarville
Photobook of the Year: Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography (Thames & Hudson)

The 2024 Vision Awards gala coincides with the 25-year anniversary of CPW’s renowned artist residency, Woodstock AIR. This is an especially meaningful milestone for the organization because Keisha Scarville was a Woodstock AIR twenty-one years ago, in 2003. Her prize for emerging photographer, the Saltzman Prize, is presented in cooperation with CPW/PHOTOFAIRS New York.

“We couldn’t be more proud to recognize this remarkable group of honorees for the 2024 CPW Vision Awards,” said Brian Wallis, CPW Executive Director. “It should come as no surprise that they are all extraordinary women using photography to rethink how we view the world and to create progressive social change.”

For twenty years, the CPW Vision Awards have been a mainstay of CPW’s programming. Initiated in 2004, the awards first honored CPW Executive Director Colleen Kenyon and her sister Kathleen Kenyon, and artist John Dugdale. Continuing this beloved tradition in Kingston, CPW’s new home city, is a crucial part of its relaunch there. This year’s ceremony is the second the organization has staged in its future headquarters, a 40,000-square-foot historic cigar factory building on Dederick Street, acquired in February, 2023.

Nan Goldin
Nan Goldin’s photographs have documented her life and the lives of her close friends during the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and through the opioid crisis. In 2017, she launched P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) to combat the opioid crisis and to challenge the Sackler family, arts philanthropists and manufacturers of the highly addictive painkiller OxyContin. Her early photographs offered an intimate view of the subcultural demimonde of downtown New York in the 1970s, collected in the unforgettable 1986 book The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.

An-My Lê 
The subtle work of Vietnamese-American photographer An-My Lê often focuses on issues of deception and simulation, particularly as they involve the military and the landscape. In her early black-and-white series Small Wars (1999–2002), she photographed Vietnam War reenactors staging mock combat in the faux jungles of Virginia. Her recent 2023 exhibition Between Two Rivers/Giữa hai giòng sông/Entre deux rivières at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, was a thirty-year retrospective, including film, textiles, and sculpture.

Keisha Scarville
Since completing CPW’s Woodstock AIR residency in 2003, Keisha Scarville has developed a body of work that explores cultural identity, transformation, and loss. Born to Guyanese immigrant parents, Scarville was raised with an innate sense of displacement. Her Passport series (2012–16) uses passport photographs of her father that have been painted, collaged, scratched, or bedazzled. These small works offer a wry commentary on the shifting status of immigrants, and on place, longing, invisibility, and censorship.

Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography
Edited by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas, Leigh Raiford, and Laura Wexler. Ariella Aïsha Azoulay is professor of Modern Culture and Media and Comparative Literature at Brown University; Wendy Ewald is a photographer who has long collaborated on art projects throughout the world; Susan Meiselas is a documentary photographer and President of the Magnum Foundation; Leigh Raiford is professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley; and Laura Wexler is a professor of American Studies, Film & Media Studies, and Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Yale University.

About the Center for Photography at Woodstock
Founded in 1977, the Center for Photography at Woodstock is a not-for-profit arts organization dedicated to supporting artists working in photography and related media, and engaging audiences through opportunities in which creation, discovery, and learning are made possible. Community-based, artist-centered, and collaborative programming is at the heart of CPW’s mission. The tools and opportunities CPW provides for artists, creative workers, and the general public include artists’ residencies, access to equipment and workspace, exhibition opportunities, and public conversation around critical issues related to photography in a rapidly changing world. In 2022, CPW relocated from Woodstock to 474 Broadway in Kingston.

Press Images and Interview Requests
To request high resolution images for press reproduction and interviews, contact CPW by clicking here.