Project Description

The Winners of the Photography Portfolio Competition 2010

The Women’s Committee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art is pleased to announce the winners of our 2010 Photography Portfolio Competition. The competition was conceived to draw attention to photography’s significance as a contemporary art form, and as part of a strategy to broaden and build the Museum’s already extensive photography collection. The Women’s Committee hoped to attract established artists and to discover new talent. Eight hundred photographers from around the world submitted images. Our team of expert jurors selected six winning artists for the portfolio, along with one Curator’s Choice winner whose print will be sold individually.

Each of these artists’ winning images will become part of the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The six artists selected for the 2010 Photography Portfolio will each receive a $1,000 prize. The artists are:

Jinyoung Koh
Jinyoung Koh was born in Boryeong, Korea, and lives and works in both Seoul and New York City. He received a BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago and a MFA in photography and media from the California Institute of the Arts. He is currently enrolled in the graduate program in Arts and Humanities at Columbia University in New York. Koh’s focus is landscape photography. Here, he examines with a fine lens the effects of human presence on what he calls “the surfaces of our society.” He has further stated that he “wants to explore human interaction as the common thread that connects us all.”

Rory Mulligan
Rory Mulligan is a graduate of Yale University School of Art, where he received an MFA in photography. Prior to attending Yale, Mulligan studied at Fordham University in New York. He has exhibited in Tokyo, New York, and Philadelphia, and has lectured and taught at Bard College, Sarah Lawrence College, Wesleyan University, and the International Center for Photography in New York. Working primarily with black-and-white photography, Mulligan pursues a synthesis between private and public experience. His images of twisting roadways, rowhomes, and storefronts are almost all devoid of figures. His interior scenes depict a few of his friends in their familiar surroundings. Most of the human activity he observes is from a distant viewpoint. In this example, he captures the “performances” of figures on a California beach where he as photographer accepts the role of “pedestrian, participant, and director, investigating the looming presence of masculinity that simultaneously fascinates, threatens, excites and excludes me.”

Jason Reblando
Jason Reblando is a freelance multimedia photographer and video artist based in Chicago. He received his MFA in photography from Columbia College in Chicago and a BA in sociology from Boston College. He has received several grants, awards, and fellowships, primarily for his documentary work. In addition, he has had numerous exhibitions in Chicago, Philadelphia, Houston, and other major cities. Underpass is from Reblando’s New Deal Utopias series, for which he photographed three Greenbelt planned communities built by the US government in the 1930s as utopian places for people to live and work. He was drawn to these them because they represent a much different attitude toward government and civil life than predominates in the United States today. He says, “I draw inspiration for my work from my curiosity about power structures and urban planning, in order to explore the complex relationship between humans, nature, and the built environment.”

Elaine Stocki
Elaine Stocki grew up in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and received her BA in fine arts and science from the University of Manitoba. She proceeded on to Yale University, graduating with an MA in photography. In 2011, Stocki was awarded Canada’s prestigious Grange Prize. She has exhibited at numerous galleries in Canada and the United States as well as in Berlin, Germany. William was taken in New Haven, where Stocki formed a two-year friendship with a homeless man, who is one of the figures in this complex composition. Like many of the artist’s other photographs, this close study of cropped faces evokes many ideas about race and class in North America. Yet, Stocki wants her depictions of these subjects to be viewed differently than traditional documentaries about social culture. By positioning her subjects in a “farcical situation,” a type of happening or performance, she hopes to achieve this. “I like working with groups of people–groups of bodies–because there is an unexpected element to it.”

Monika Sziladi
Monika Sziladi is from Budapest, Hungary, and lives and works in New York City. She studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and in 2010 received her MFA from the Yale University School of Art and Photography. She was awarded the Alice Kimball Traveling Scholarship among other grants and fellowships, notably at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in New York. Sziladi has exhibited widely since 2005 and her shows have been accompanied by several articles and catalogues. Ribs is from her series Wide Receivers, which presents primarily young women dressed for parties or participating in outrageous scenes at public events. Sziladi is a supreme social observer, and her images are intended to humorously prod the viewer into exploring the effects of social media on contemporary life.

Martine Fougeron
Martine Fougeron was born in Paris, France and lives in New York City. She is a fine art photographer, a painter, and formerly an expert in the perfume industry. Fougeron was educated at the Lycee Francais in New York, Wellesley College, the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris, and the International Center for Photography. She exhibits in the United States and abroad; her work is held in major public and private collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.
Tete-a-Tete, Fougeron’s biographic story of her two adolescent sons, Nicolas and Adrien, is considered to be one of the best in contemporary photography and relatively unique as a mother/son documentation. Beginning in 2005, Fougeron created a visual diary of the boys and their friends primarily at their homes, making pictures that are naturally staged and delicately lit but alive with spontaneity. Fougeron states, “Adolescence is a liminal state between childhood and adulthood, between the feminine and the masculine, and between innocence and a burgeoning self-consciousness.”

The Curator’s Choice single-print winner will receive a $500 prize:
Janet Pritchard – Curator’s Choice Winner
A landscape photographer, Janet Pritchard is keenly interested in history and a sense of place. She is an associate professor at the University of Connecticut, where she teaches a class on the American landscape. Pritchard graduated from the University of New Mexico with an MA/MFA and began her teaching career at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia and the University of Colorado. She has received several awards and fellowships, specifically at the American Antiquarian Society, where she studied the annual reports of the US Geographical Survey of Territories from the 1870s. Rock Climbing is from a series called Views from Wonderland, Volume 1. Pritchard is also an outdoor education instructor and has made several trips to photograph Yellowstone National Park, where she experiences the park emotionally through what she calls “the lens of personal memory.” In her pictures of the park, she attempts to preserve history and to link her own experiences there with the images of the past. Pritchard looked closely at the first photographs of the park by William Henry Jackson, paintings by Thomas Moran, and vintage postcards. She developed a method that she describes as “the pursuit of artistic vision through historical empathy.”