COLLIER PRIZE WINNERS 2003

Musicians at Fiesta San Geronimo, Taos, NM, 1939. Photograph by John Collier, Jr., courtesy of the Collier Family Collection.

2003 winners were Corinne Kratz and Douglas Harper.

Corinne Kratz
2002 The Ones Who Are Wanted: the Politics of Representation in a Photographic Exhibition. Berkeley: University of California Press

Corinne A. Katz is recognized firstly for a body of photography of the Okiek people of Kenya from 1974 to the present made in conjunction with ethnographic fieldwork, and secondly for a traveling exhibition of those photographs, primarily from 1982-89, that was shown in Kenya and the United States, and the process by which the selection of photographs and captions was made. The choices were made in concert with the subjects, with deliberation and imagination of how the individuals and the society itself would be viewed by different audiences. Thirdly, for the book, The Ones That are Wanted: Communication and the Politics of Representation in a Photographic Exhibition, about the issues of communication and representation central to the idea of a photographic exhibition. The book sets the photographs in a deeper context, and examines the nature and meaning of a photographic exhibition as it applies to widening circles of viewers, from the subjects and their families, to their fellow Kenyans, to museum visitors in distant cities.

Douglas Harper
2001 Changing Works: Visions of a Lost Agriculture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Douglas Harper is recognized for his use of archival photographic evidence from fifty years ago, combined with his contemporary photography to visually compare the way dairy farming in upstate New York is done now to an earlier stage of mechanization and consolidation in that occupation. Both old and new photographs were used for elicitation in interviews and conversations with older farmers who had worked through the half century between the two photo records. The book, Changing Works: Visions of a Lost Agriculture, is an elegant volume that privileges the visual record as integral to telling the story.