Kenneth J. Botto Research Fellowship

Awards up to $2,500 to support research at the Center for Creative Photography by curators, writers, and researchers investigating the life and work of Kenneth J. Botto; researchers investigating photographers working to incorporate set-up, collage, or constructed imagery; or researchers investigating photographers whose work is a critical comment on political, social, and/or art historical issues in society.

Recipients: 

2020-2021

• Ariel Evans, Visiting Assistant Professor, School of Photographic Arts and Sciences, Rochester Institute of Technology, to support a current research project entitled, Pussy Porn and Other Arguments in American Feminist Photography, 1968-1988.

2019

• No fellowship awarded

2018

• Catherine Barth is a PhD candidate at Emory University, Atlanta. She will conduct research for her dissertation titled, Frederick Sommer: At the Limits of Avant-Garde Photography. Combining various techniques in photography, drawing, painting, and collage, Sommer created avant-garde works that challenged conventional standards and offered a new model of photographic expression. Drawing on the wealth of original sources in the Sommer and related archives at the CCP, this project aims to provide a richer understanding of his work and the debates around alternate visions of the medium at mid-century.
• Eric Goldfisher is a PhD student in the Department of Geography at the University of Minnesota. His dissertation project entitled, The Difference that Seeing Makes: Homelessness and Visuality in Urban Ecology, examines how the visual representation of homelessness structures knowledge of urban public spaces, and how that knowledge produces material impacts both in urban environments in the in the lives of homeless people themselves.

2017

• Nadya Bair received her PhD in Art History from the University of Southern California in 2016. Her current research is for a book, The Decisive Network: Magnum Photos and the Postwar Image Market, a history of the international picture agency Magnum, founded in 1947.
• Jeanne Dreskin is a PhD scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Her dissertation titled, Left of Center: Displacements and intersectionalitities in Photographic Practices of New York and Los Angeles, 1970-1990 examines the photographic work of Lorraine O’Grady, Patrick Nagatani, and the collective Asco. 

2016

• Anton Lee is a PhD scholar, Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory, University of British Columbia, Vancouver and his doctoral dissertation research focuses on the strategic use of visual sequences by a small number of American photographers during the 1970s, whose work wielded great influence on the foundation of photographic discourse in France through the 1980s.
• David Shneer is the Louis P. Singer Chair of Jewish History, Professor of History, Religious Studies, and Jewish Studies, University of Colorado Boulder. Dr. Shneer’s book project, Grief: The History of the World’s First Holocaust Liberation Photograph and the Man Who Made It, uses Dmitrii Baltermants’s early Holocaust liberation photographs to examine photography—as art, document, object of financial value, and evidence of atrocities—on a global scale. At the Center, he will study collections in an effort to understand how photographs become commodities.

2015

• Meaghan L. Beadle, Department of History, University of Virginia, Charlottesville. Project: Dissertation research into the photographic language of women’s liberation in order to understand how visual culture shaped and was shaped by the movement. This is What a Feminist Looks Like! Photography and Feminism, 1968-1980
• Thom Sempere, Photographer. Project: the photographer Kenneth Botto
• Professor Mark Van Proyen, San Francisco Art Institute and Corresponding Editor, Art in America. Project: Kenneth J. Botto and the Tradition of Surrealist Photography