Announcing 2022 Light Work Artists-in-Residence

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With great excitement, Light Work announces the following 2022 Artists-in-Residence: Mónica Alcázar-Duarte (United Kingdom), Nando Alvarez-Perez (Buffalo, New York), Simon Benjamin (Brooklyn, New York), Gary Burnley (Ridgefield, Connecticut), William Camargo (Chicago, Illinois), Jasmine Clarke (Brooklyn, New York), Paula Damasceno (Greensboro, North Carolina), Mercedes Dorame (Burbank, California), Dylan Hausthor (Peaks Island, Maine), Musuk Nolte (Lima, Peru), Elle Perez (Brooklyn, New York), Nona Faustine Simmons (Brooklyn, New York), and Claire A. Warden (Phoenix, Arizona). 

Each year, Light Work supports emerging, under-represented, and previously excluded artists working in photography and related media with support totaling more than $60,000. In addition to receiving an unrestricted stipend of $5,000, each artist has access to our technical and professional resources and facilities.

“It’s my great pleasure to congratulate the 2022 Light Work Artist-in-Residence recipients,” said Light Work director Dan Boardman. “I know I speak for the entire staff when I say we are thrilled to have artists working in our space throughout 2022. This year’s cohort exemplifies the wide range of approaches making up contemporary photographic practice, and we are looking forward to providing space and time to each of these practitioners.”

This year, Light Work has two exciting collaborations with distinguished organizations in support of three of our artists. Autograph in London, UK, has sponsored the residency of Mónica Alcázar-Duarte, the latest in a partnership that dates from 1996. Additionally, the Darryl Chappell Foundation has sponsored the residencies of Jasmine Clarke and Gary Burnley. The first year of Light Work’s partnership with the Darryl Chappell Foundation advances our shared mission to foster an appreciation of the fine arts among members of the African Diaspora through grants and to deepen an appreciation of the fine arts in the larger community. 

Light Work’s highly competitive residency program dates from 1976 and now receives nearly 1,000 submissions annually. Following an international call for submissions, we select twelve to fifteen artists and invite them to come to Syracuse for one month to pursue creative projects. To date, more than 500 artists have participated in the Light Work Artist-in-Residence Program and many have gone on to achieve international acclaim. The artists who receive this distinction embody Light Work’s mission of providing direct artist support to emerging, under-represented, and previously excluded artists working in photography and digital imaging.

We are pleased to announce the 2022 Light Work Artists-in-Residence!

Mónica Alcázar-Duarte (United Kingdom)

Nando Alvarez-Perez (Buffalo, New York)

Simon Benjamin (Brooklyn, New York)

Gary Burnely (Ridgefield, Connecticut)

William Camargo (Chicago, Illinois)

Jasmine Clarke (Brooklyn, New York)

Paula Damasceno (Greensboro, North Carolina)

Mercedes Dorame (Burbank, California)

Dylan Hausthor (Peaks Island, Maine)

Musuk Nolte (Lima, Peru)

Elle Perez (Brooklyn, New York)

Nona Faustine Simmons (Brooklyn, New York)

Claire A. Warden (Phoenix, Arizona)

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See past Artists-in-Residence at www.lightwork.org/air
Applications are now open for 2023. Apply at lightwork.slideroom.com

Odette England Receives 2021 Light Work Photobook Award

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With enormous pleasure and in partnership with Saint Lucy Books,  Light Work announces Rhode Island-based artist Odette England as the recipient of the 2021 Light Work Photobook Award for her monograph, Dairy Character.  Light Work gives the Photobook Award annually to an artistic project that deserves international attention. “Odette England’s Dairy Character is an insightful and distinct book that looks at rural life, parenthood, and femininity,” said Light Work director Dan Boardman. “Odette’s work exemplifies our mission to support emerging and under-represented artists. Her approach to the artist book is wholly her own and blurs the boundaries between archive, narrative, and memoir. We’re excited to collaborate with Saint Lucy’s on publication. “

The monograph is available for pre-order in Light Work’s shop with anticipated delivery in September 2021. As the winner of the 2021 Photobook Award, England’s book will appear as the Book Collectors’ selection in Light Work’s exclusive 2022 Annual Subscription program. 

It’s a wonderful, unexpected honor, to have this work recognized by Light Work and to be in the company of previous winners, including Mark McKnight, Andres Gonzalez, and Rose Marie Cromwell,” said Odette England. “I’m grateful for a light to be shone on rural girls and women, on how they’re frequently excluded or marginalized from important resources, and on the division of gender and labor that prevails. To make a photobook that makes palpable the emotional quotient of growing up girl when the loudest, strongest voices didn’t sound like my own, and to illustrate and contextualize a kind of wrestling with how things are placed onto our bodies by others as well as by history and ancestry, has been challenging but also revealing. It’s as much a photographic autopsy and critique of my relationship to a place I still call home but live no longer, as it is a focus on the inner lives and expectations of rural girls and women.

Dairy Character is a loose chronicle of England’s experience growing up on a rural dairy farm in southern Australia. Combining recent photographs, family snapshots, archival images, and autobiographical short stories, England examines the male-dominated farming community where she was raised and the gender-based repression that rural women and girls experience. Her images and texts evoke a girl introduced to reproductive labor at an early age. A girl who wanted a pink room. A girl fenced in by interconnecting forms of vulnerability. A girl who had a cow named after her.

Odette England
Dairy Character
Saint Lucy Books / Light Work
188 pages
ISBN:978-0-578-87587-3
First Editon
Signed by the artist

Odette England is an artist and writer who uses photography, performance, writing, and the archive to explore themes of autobiography, land, gender, and ritual. She edited the critically acclaimed book, Keeper of the Hearth: Picturing Roland Barthes’ Unseen Photograph (Schilt, 2020). Public collections holding England’s work include the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, George Eastman Museum, Museum of Contemporary Photography, New Mexico Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, and Texas A&M University. In 2021, Radius Books published her collaboration with Jennifer Garza-Cuen, Past Paper // Present Marks: Responding to Rauschenberg.

About Saint Lucy Books

Mark Alice Durant launched Saint Lucy Books in 2011. Saint Lucy is devoted to writing about photography and contemporary art. Saint Lucy features essays, portfolios, and wide-ranging conversations with artists, writers, and curators. Saint Lucy Books publishes idiosyncratic books that combine words and images to investigate the marginal, hidden, and parallel histories of photography. Both Aperture and Paris Photo shortlisted Hidden Mother for Best Photobook of the Year, among its many accolades and enthusiastic reviews. Reviewing 27 Contexts in 4 Columns, UCLA art historian George Baker writes, “Durant’s writing—his storytelling—is often thrilling, wrenching, beautiful.” Of Friends, Enemies, and Strangers, Marvin Heiferman writes, “One of our shrewdest image-makers and takers, Oliver Wasow pits the sentimental against the sinister, nature against human nature, and private lives against public ones.”

Pre-order a first edition SIGNED copy of Dairy Character by Odette England and you will also receive a 2022 subscription to Contact Sheet (a $105 value) for only $65!