2024 CPW Vision Awards

The Center for Photography at Woodstock (CPW) is proud to announce the recipients of its 2024 Vision Awards. Each of the honorees has had a significant impact on the field of photography, and will be celebrated in person at a dinner event on April 20, in CPW’s new headquarters at 25 Dederick Street in Kingston. This year, we also inaugurate the Saltzman Prize for emerging photographer (presented in cooperation with CPW/PHOTOFAIRS New York), and celebrate the 25th anniversary of our nationally recognized residency program, Woodstock AIR, which provides direct support to artists of color working with photography. To date, more than 150 artists have participated in Woodstock AIR, including LaToya Ruby Frazier, Deana Lawson, Tommy Kha, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya.

2024 CPW Vision Award Honorees

Nan Goldin
Lifetime Achievement

Nan Goldin’s photographs have documented her life and the lives of her close friends during the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and through the opioid crisis. In 2017, she launched P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) to combat the opioid crisis and to challenge the Sackler family, arts philanthropists and manufacturers of the highly addictive painkiller OxyContin. Her early photographs offered an intimate view of the subcultural demimonde of downtown New York in the 1970s, collected in the unforgettable 1986 book The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.

An-My Lê
Photographer of the Year

The subtle work of Vietnamese-American photographer An-My Lê often focuses on issues of deception and simulation, particularly as they involve the military and the landscape. In her early black-and-white series Small Wars (1999–2002), she photographed Vietnam War reenactors staging mock combat in the faux jungles of Virginia. Her recent 2023 exhibition Between Two Rivers/Giữa hai giòng sông/Entre deux rivières at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, was a thirty-year retrospective, including film, textiles, and sculpture.

Keisha Scarville
Saltzman Prize for Emerging Photographer
Presented in Cooperation with CPW/PHOTOFAIRS New York

Since completing CPW’s Woodstock AIR residency in 2003, Keisha Scarville has developed a body of work that explores cultural identity, transformation, and loss. Born to Guyanese immigrant parents, Scarville was raised with an innate sense of displacement. Her Passport series (2012–ongoing) uses passport photographs of her father that have been painted, collaged, scratched, or bedazzled. These small works offer a wry commentary on the shifting status of immigrants, and on place, longing, invisibility, and censorship.

Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography, edited by Ariella Aïsha
Azoulay, Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas, Leigh Raiford, and Laura Wexler
Photobook of the Year

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay is professor of Modern Culture and Media and Comparative Literature at Brown University; Wendy Ewald is a photographer who has long collaborated on art projects throughout the world; Susan Meiselas is a documentary photographer and President of the Magnum Foundation; Leigh Raiford is professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley; and Laura Wexler is a professor of American Studies, Film & Media Studies, and Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Yale University.