ICP Announces 2018 Infinity Award Winners

NEW YORK, Feb. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The International Center of Photography (ICP), the world's leading institution dedicated to photography and visual culture, today announced the 2018 honorees of its annual Infinity Awards, widely considered the leading honor for excellence in the field. The 34th annual ICP Infinity Awards will be held in New York City on the evening of Monday, April 9 at Spring Studios.

"Every year, the Infinity Awards give us a chance to highlight the significant talents of photographers, artists, and creative innovators," said ICP Executive Director Mark Lubell. "These extraordinary individuals are producing work that is not just documenting the world—but helping to create change. We are excited to celebrate their vision and their impact."

2018 INFINITY AWARD CATEGORY AND RECIPIENTS: 

• Lifetime Achievement: Bruce Davidson

• Applied: Alexandra Bell

• Art: Samuel Fosso

• Artist's Book: Dayanita Singh, Museum Bhavan

• Critical Writing and Research: Maurice Berger, Race Stories column for the Lens section of the New York Times

• Documentary and Photojournalism: Amber Bracken

• Emerging Photographer: Natalie Keyssar

• Online Platform and New Media: Women Photograph

• Special Presentation: Juergen Teller

• Trustees Award: Thomson Reuters

Since 1985, the Infinity Awards have recognized major contributions and emerging talent in the fields of photojournalism, art, fashion photography, and publishing. Past recipients include Berenice Abbott, Lynsey Addario, Richard Avedon, Ariella Azoulay, David Bailey, Harry Benson, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Sophie Calle, Edmund Clark, Roy DeCarava, Elliott Erwitt, Harold Evans, Larry Fink, For Freedoms, Robert Frank, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Adam Fuss, David Goldblatt, Paul Graham, David Guttenfelder, Mishka Henner, André Kertész, Steven Klein, William Klein, Karl Lagerfeld, Annie Leibovitz, Helen Levitt, Mary Ellen Mark, Ryan McGinley, Susan Meiselas, Duane Michals, Daidō Moriyama, Zanele Muholi, Shirin Neshat, Gordon Parks, Gilles Peress, Walid Raad, Eugene Richards, Sebastião Salgado, Malick Sidibé, Lorna Simpson, Cindy Sherman, Peter Van Atgmael, and Ai Weiwei, among others. Past Infinity Award attendees include Hamish Bowles, Naomi Campbell, Grace Coddington, Bella Hadid, Carolina Herrera, Arianna Huffington, Tommy Lee Jones, Karlie Kloss, Dan Rather, Alexandra Richards, Leelee Sobieski, Ben Stiller, and Christine Taylor. 

The annual event is ICP's largest annual fundraiser and supports a full range of programs, including exhibitions, collections, community outreach, scholarships, and the ICP School.

The 2018 honorees were chosen by a selection committee composed of Isolde Brielmaier, assistant professor, NYU Tisch and executive director of Arts, Culture & Community, Westfield World Trade Center; Marina Chao, assistant curator, Exhibitions, ICP; James Estrin, Lens blog co-editor, senior staff photographer, New York Times; and Antwaun Sargent, writer and critic.

Sponsored by Thomson Reuters, Hearst, and Harbers Studios, the 34th annual ICP Infinity Awards will draw more than 500 attendees from the worlds of art, business, entertainment, fashion, philanthropy, and photography. Co-chairing this year's event are Marjorie Rosen, Michael A. Clinton, and Judith Bookbinder. For more information or advance reservations, please contact [email protected] or 212.857.9714. 

ABOUT THE 2018 INFINITY AWARD HONOREES 

In a career spanning more than half a century, Bruce Davidson is known for his dedication to the documentation of social inequality. Davidson attended Rochester Institute of Technology, as well as Yale University, where he studied with Josef Albers. He was later drafted into the army and stationed near Paris, where he met Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of the founders of the renowned cooperative photography agency Magnum Photos. After his military service, Davidson worked as a freelance photographer for Life magazine and, in 1958, became a full member of Magnum. From 1958 to 1961, he created such seminal bodies of work as The Circus and Brooklyn Gang. In 1962, he received a Guggenheim fellowship and immersed himself in documenting the American civil rights movement. In 1963, the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented his early work in a solo exhibition, the first of several. In 1967, Davidson received the first grant for photography from the National Endowment for the Arts. For two years, he focused his lens on East 100th Street in Manhattan. The photographs were exhibited at MoMA in 1970, and remain one of his most acclaimed bodies of work. In 1980, he explored the vitality and distress of the New York City subway. From 1991 to 1995 he photographed the landscape and layers of life in Central Park. More recently, he followed this exploration of nature to Paris and Los Angeles, carefully examining the relationship between nature and urban life. Davidson received an Open Society Institute Individual Fellowship in 1998 to return to East 100th Street to document the revitalization and renewal that occurred in the thirty years since he last photographed it. His awards include the Lucie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Documentary Photography in 2004, a Gold Medal Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Arts Club in 2007, the Outstanding Contribution to Photography Award from Sony in 2011, and an honorary doctorate in fine arts from the Corcoran School of Art and Design. Classic bodies of work from his fifty-year career have been extensively published in monographs and are included in major public and private fine art collections around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art,  International Center of Photography in New York, and Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. He currently lives in New York City, and continues to make photographs.

Alexandra Bell is a multidisciplinary artist who investigates the complexities of narrative, information consumption, and perception. Utilizing various media, she deconstructs language and imagery to explore the tension between marginal experiences and dominant histories. Through investigative research, she considers the ways media frameworks construct memory and inform discursive practices around race, politics, and culture. In her current series, Counternarratives, Bell edits New York Times articles, altering headlines, changing images, and redacting text to reveal oppressive patterns in news reportage and society at large. Her work has been exhibited at MoMA PS1, We Buy Gold, Koenig & Clinton Gallery, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, Atlanta Contemporary, and Usdan Gallery. Bell holds a BA in interdisciplinary studies in the humanities from the University of Chicago and an MS in journalism from Columbia University. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Maurice Berger is a writer, cultural historian, and curator whose work focuses on the intersection of race and visual culture. He is research professor and chief curator at the Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Race Stories, his monthly column, for the Lens section of the New York Times, explores the relationship of photography to concepts and social issues about race not usually covered in the mainstream media. His writings have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, Aperture, Village Voice, Brooklyn Rail, Pen America, Wired, and the Los Angeles Times. His books include White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), a finalist for Horace Mann Bond Book Award of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research, Harvard University, and For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights (Yale, 2010). Berger has received honors and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, Association of Art Museum Curators, International Association of Art Critics, as well as an Emmy Award nomination. For his work on Race Stories, he was awarded the 2014 Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation ArtsWriters Grant.

Amber Bracken is a member of Rogue Collective and lifelong Albertan covering assignments across the province and farther from home. After getting her start as a staffer in daily newspapers, she has moved on to a freelance career and the pursuit of long-term projects. She has since worked with many clients, including National Geographic, The Globe and Mail, BuzzFeed, Reuters, Maclean's, The Canadian Press, Postmedia, and Canadian Geographic. In her personal work, Bracken's interest is in the intersection of photography, journalism, and public service, with a special focus on issues affecting Indigenous people. With the rise of movements like Idle No More, communities are increasingly empowered to fight for a more just relationship with the government and non-native people. She is looking for ways to represent and foster that strength. With that intention, Bracken has been building relationships in Indigenous communities and starting to document important issues around culture, environment, and the effects of intergenerational trauma from colonialism.

Samuel Fosso had to flee his native Cameroon due to the persecutions caused by the Biafra war. He sought refuge in Bangui, Central African Republic, where, at thirteen, he opened his own photo studio. His expressive black-and-white self-portraits from the 1970s make reference to popular West African culture—musicians, the latest youth fashions, and political advertising—constituting a sustained and unprecedented photographic project that explores sexuality, gender, and African self-representation. Stagings of his personal identity, these self-portraits would gradually take a universal social and political dimension. In his series titled African Spirits (2008), he embodies iconic identities of fundamental characters of African independence, the civil rights movement in the United States, or prominent cultural figures from Africa and the United States, such as Leopold Sedar Senghor, Aimé Césaire, Muhammad Ali, Seydou Keita, Martin Luther King, or Nelson Mandela. In his latest series, Black Pope, Fosso challenges the relentless catholic veneration of whiteness in contemporary visual culture as resurrected in a restive, darker protesting version of the Pope. It is a series that directly challenges normative regimes of truth, power, officialdom, and the accoutrements that are used to reinforce belief.

Natalie Keyssar is a documentary photographer based in Brooklyn, New York. She is interested in class inequality, youth culture, and the personal effects of political turmoil and violence, primarily in the US and Latin America. She has a BFA in painting and illustration from the Pratt Institute. Keyssar has contributed to publications such as the New York Times Magazine, Time, Bloomberg Businesweek, and California Sunday Magazine and been awarded by organizations including the Philip Jones Griffith Award (Finalist 2017), the Aaron Siskind Foundation, PDN 30, Magenta Flash Forward, and American Photography. She has taught new media at the International Center of Photography in New York and has instructed at various workshops across the US and Latin America with organizations such as Foundry, Women Photograph, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the IWMF, and International Photography Festival of Puebla, Mexico. She is a Pulitzer Center Grantee and a long-term fellow with the International Women's Media Foundation Latin America program.

Dayanita Singh is an artist. Her medium is photography and the book is her primary form. She was born in 1961 in New Delhi. She studied visual communication at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad and documentary photography at the International Center of Photography in New York. She has published twelve books: Zakir Hussain (1986), Myself,Mona Ahmed (2001), Privacy (2003), Chairs (2005), Go Away Closer (2007), Sent a Letter (2008), Blue Book (2009), Dream Villa (2010), Dayanita Singh (2010), House of Love (2011), File Room (2013), and Museum of Chance (2014). Her works have been shown in solo exhibitions at the MMK, Frankfurt (2014), Art Institute of Chicago (2014), the Hayward Gallery, London (2013), Frith Street Gallery, London (2012), and the Mapfre Foundation, Madrid (2010). She has also shown in the 2nd Kochi Biennale (2014), at the German Pavillion in the Venice Biennale (2013), at the Fourth Guangzhou Triennial, as part of ILLUMInations at the 54th Venice Biennale (2011), and at Manifesta 7 (2008). 

Juergen Teller studied at the Bayerische Staatslehranstalt für Photographie in Munich, before moving to London in 1986. Considered one of the most important photographers of his generation, Teller has successfully navigated both the art world and commercial photography since beginning his career in the late 1980s, blurring the boundaries between his commissioned and personal work in his numerous publications and exhibitions. In 2003, Teller was awarded the Citibank Prize for Photography, and, in 2007, was asked to represent the Ukraine as one of five artists in the 52nd Venice Biennale. He has published forty-one artist's books and exhibited internationally, including solo shows at the Photographer's Gallery, London (1998), Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2004), Foundation Cartier, Paris (2006), Daelim Contemporary Art Museum, Seoul (2011), the Institute of Contemporary Art, London (2013), Deste Foundation, Athens (2014), Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin (2015), Phillips, London (2015), Bundeskunsthalle Bonn (2016), Blum & Poe Gallery, Tokyo (2017), Kunstpalais, Erlangen (2017), and Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin (2017). He currently holds a professorship of photography at the Akademie der Bildende Künste Nürnberg.

Thomson Reuters is the world's leading source of news and information for professional markets. Our customers rely on us to deliver the intelligence, technology and expertise they need to find trusted answers. The business has operated in more than 100 countries for more than 100 years. For more information, visit thomsonreuters.com or tr.com.

Women Photograph is an initiative that launched in 2017 to elevate the voices of female visual journalists. The private database includes more than 650 independent women documentary photographers based in 91 countries and is available privately to any commissioning editor or organization. Women Photograph also operates an annual series of project grants for emerging and established photojournalists, a yearlong mentorship program, and a travel fund to help female photographers access workshops, festivals, and other developmental opportunities. Our mission is to shift the gender makeup of the photojournalism community and ensure that our industry's chief storytellers are as diverse as the communities they hope to represent.

ABOUT ICP 
The International Center of Photography (ICP) is the world's leading institution dedicated to photography and visual culture. Founded by Cornell Capa in 1974 to preserve the legacy of "concerned photography"—in which the reproduced image is both a catalyst and record of social change—ICP's mission endures even as the medium and practices of socially engaged imagemaking have changed. Through its new museum, located at 250 Bowery, as well as exhibitions, school, public programs, and community outreach, ICP offers an open forum for dialogue about the role images play in our culture. Since its founding, more than 700 exhibitions and thousands of classes have been presented, providing instruction at every level. ICP brings together photographers and artists, students, and scholars to create and interpret the world of the image, exploring photography and visual culture as mediums of empowerment and as catalysts for wide-reaching social change. Learn more at icp.org.

SOURCE International Center of Photography

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