McKnight: New Photography

October 28—December 19, 2003

The four McKnight Fellows in this exhibition were Doug Beasley, Bill Cottman, Vince Leo, and Peter Haakon Thompson.

DOUG BEASLEY explores the spiritual aspects of people and place in his work. An ongoing body of work “Sacred Places” explores what is considered sacred, spiritual and ritualized in other cultures as well as our own. His McKnight Fellowship work explores disappearing green space and “injured” landscapes around the country.
BILL COTTMAN records and pays tribute to elemental forces in his life, the faces and places investigating his identity and telling his story. His compositions are influenced by street photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Garry Winogrand, and Robert Frank, while his content is shaped by The Sweet Flypaper of Life, the 1955 collaboration between writer Langston Hughes and photographer Roy DeCarava.
VINCE LEO presented a video projection installation from his poignant project Little America, featuring works spanning decades documenting the photographer’s Italian American heritage though images of his family and their surroundings.
PETER HAAKON THOMPSON records his private relationship to places that are essentially public. These images are a part of an unbroken seven-year chain of visual self-examination inside places where he is by himself, standing still, looking, listening, thinking, and taking pictures.

The three review panelists also featured in the exhibition were:

JIM GOLDBERG, an artist and writer who has been involved in long-term, in-depth collaborations with mostly invisible or misrepresented groups of people. He is best known for his award-winning photographic books and multi-media exhibits, among them Rich and Poor, Nursing Home, Hospice, and most recently Raised by Wolves. Jim Goldberg has received numerous awards and grants including a Guggenheim Fellowship, three National Endowment for the Arts awards, a Eureka Fellowship, The Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Fellowship, and most recently both the Hasselblad and Art Council Awards. He is currently working on his third monograph tentatively titled “Coming and Going.”
ANDREA MODICA, a 1994 Guggenheim recipient, well known for the 1996 book, Treadwell, “a rich, empathetic, and often wrenching study of small town family life in upstate New York.” The Smithsonian Institute published a monograph of her photographs of minor league baseball players in 1993. More recently, Modica has worked on a variety of editorial and corporate projects, including portraits of fathers and their children for The Fatherhood Foundation, a series on adopted children, and an in-depth study of 100-year-old skeletons and skulls from a potter's field that is being excavated, which resulted in the book Human Being.
WILLIE OSTERMAN, the recipient of many awards including the Agfa Italy Artistic Development Award; his work has also been collected internationally by numerous Museums. His book, Deja View: Bologna Italy, first published in 2000, went into a second printing in 2002. He presented a viewpoint that attempts to search out myths that he can live by. They are all created in sacred spaces, some recognized by our society and others not. By entering these sacred spaces and interacting with them, he is attempting to create a new personal myth to live by, and to try to make a stronger connection between himself, culture and the planet.

To view recipient portfolios or to obtain additional information, visit the McKnight Photography Fellowship website.