35TH ANNUAL LIGHT WORK
GRANTS IN PHOTOGRAPHY
The grant program was established in 1975 to encourage the creation of new work and scholarship in Central New York. The grants include a cash award of $2,000, an exhibition at Light Work and publication in Contact Sheet. The grant is given annually to three Central New York photographers, critics, or photo-historians. Applicants must reside in one of the following Central New York Counties: Broome, Cayuga, Chemung, Chenango, Cortland, Herkimer, Jefferson, Lewis, Madison, Oneida, Onondaga, Oswego, Schuyler, Seneca, St. Lawrence, Tioga, or Tompkins. Submissions are reviewed by a panel of judges who reside outside the eligible geographic area, and grants will be awarded on the strength of the candidate's portfolio and application. Light Work interprets the medium of photography in broad terms and encourages the submission of work produced with new and traditional technologies. Application forms for the 36th Annual Light Work Grants will become available in early 2010. [ Grant History ] |
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The 35th Light Work Grant recipients are Karen Brummund (Ithaca), Laura Adams Guth (Manlius), and Stephen Shaner (Syracuse). Their work will be featured in an exhibition in the Light Work Hallway Gallery in Fall 2009 as well as in The Contact Sheet Annual.
Karen Brummund |
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Laura Adams Guth Laura Adams Guth’s large-scale color photographs closely investigate the macabre beauty and extreme detail of collectable dolls such as those sold on television shopping networks like QVC. Her curiosity in this subject stems from the polarity with which these dolls are generally regarded—while many express finding them decidedly creepy, others feel strong endearment toward them. Her objective is to illuminate this difference of opinion by skirting the boundaries amid beauty and unease, adulation and deviancy. Guth is a photographer, multi-media installation artist, and educator. She earned her MFA in Photography from the University of Oklahoma and BA in Art History from the University of Maryland, European Division. She has exhibited internationally and has received numerous awards, including a fellowship with The Photography Institute. Guth currently lives and works in Manlius, NY, and teaches photography at Cazenovia College.
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Stephen Shaner Stephen Shaner’s images are the result of the process of recollecting traces of remote incidents. In December 1981, during the Cold War, nearly 1,000 people were brutally murdered in El Mozote, El Salvador. It was the largest massacre in Latin American history. One of the few survivors, Rufina Amaya, accused an abusive Salvadoran military, partly trained and supported by the US, of the massacre, but was ignored. Years later in 1992, just after El Salvador’s civil war had ended, a team of forensic archaeologists began to find evidence of and expose the slaughter. At that point approximately 70,000 people had lost their lives in the decade-long conflict, and so this single incident garnered less interest, and therefore resulted in little justice for the dead. Images from Shaner’s El Salvador: Faded Scars series, as well as his other work from other countries, strive to capture selected world events that may once have been viewed as catastrophic, but have since begun to fade. According to Shaner, “Long after the nightmare act has occurred, or is even acknowledged, I choose to inventory and recover a past in these places where trauma and death is but the fragment of a memory.” Shaner is a freelance photographer and an instructional design consultant. He received a BFA from Rochester Institute of Technology and an AAS from SUNY Morrisville. His work has been exhibited nationwide. |
