Film Photo Award Fall 2022
As proud sponsors of the Film Photo Award, we are excited to share in the announcing of its Fall 2022 film grants!
Visionary Project Awards:
Samantha Box and Chance DeVille
Samantha Box is a Jamaican-born, Bronx-based photographer. During the next year, using the generous supply of Kodak 4x5 Portra 400 provided by the Film Photo Award, she will expand her on-going still-life series, Caribbean Dreams, creating a suite of photographs that question the ways that ideas of the wild landscape, paradise and utopia have been delineated in relation to the Caribbean, and to the “New World” at large.
The 200 sheets of film granted by this Award will provide much-needed and -valued room for the experimentation that—in Box’s experience—leads to images that have gone beyond initial concepts, broaching greater, more nuanced narratives of Caribbean diaspora.
Chance DeVille is a queer artist and educator who was born and raised in the deep American South. Currently based in Rhode Island, Chance frequents Louisiana, where they collaborate with their mother to make Growing Tired of Calloused Knees. This project attempts to carry the multitude of issues that stems from their experience of domestic abuse as a catalyst for severe mental illness, poverty, substance addiction and its effects on family dynamics. The photographs and related material desire to hold empathy and understanding for generational trauma, while visualizing these difficult topics at their family home.
With the support of the Film Photo Award, Chance will be able to continue to interrogate the issues that are held within their project and make work with their mother, Tammy.
Student Project Award:
Emma Ressel
Emma Ressel is a photographer from Bar Harbor, Maine, and is currently working toward her MFA at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. In her project Glass Eyes Stare Back, she uses 4x5 film and collage to make fictional images of animals in nature, visualizing the disorientation she experiences living through environmental change. By layering aging taxidermy specimens in natural history museums with prints and backdrops, she seeks to create false and fragmented landscapes that are somewhere between dead and alive, familiar and fearsome, and removed from linear time.
With the awarded film, Emma will work closely with collections at the Museum of Southwest Biology, focusing on specimens that are extinct, endangered, and significant to central New Mexico ecosystems. She will build large-scale, narrative photographs that speak to species displacement, grief, and the wonder of imagined futures.
The Film Photo Award offers three grants twice a year—the New Project Award, Continuing Project Award and the Student Project Award. Winners receive a year’s supply of the film of their choice from Kodak Professional Film and complimentary processing at Griffin Editions. In addition to this, the Student Project Award winner receives a 4x5 camera from Standard Cameras.
All images and artist bios courtesy of Film Photo Award.