Now in its 30th year, the non-profit organization, Center, supports socially and environmentally engaged lens-based efforts that respect all people, open minds, and support a shared human experience. Located in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Center hosts one of the world’s longest-running photography portfolio reviews. One of Center’s most significant contributions to the world of photography is the annual award and grant program which has supported thousands of artists over the years. Webs of Significance features many of the 2024 award-winning photographers. The Project Development Grant, juried by Gregory Harris from the High Museum of Art, went to Sara Abbaspour for her series Transitional Realms. The Project Launch Grant, juried by Jehan Jilani from The Atlantic, went to Austin Bryant for his series Where They Still Remain. The Personal Award, juried by Kristen Gresh from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, went to Matthew Finley for his series An Impossibly Normal Life. The Socially Engaged Award, juried by Noelle Flores Théard from The New Yorker, went to Sofie Hecht for her series A Matter of When: Stories of New Mexico’s Downwinders. The Multimedia Award, juried by David Barreda from National Geographic, went to Robert Pluma for his series Hidden Histories of San Antonio. The Me & Eve Award, juried by Eve Schillo from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, went to Anna Reed for her series Merging Dimensions. The Environmental Award, juried by Sabine Meyer from the National Audubon Society, went to John Trotter for his series No Agua, No Vida: The Human Alteration of the Colorado River. Center shares with the Turchin Center a commitment to change the world through the power of the visual arts.
Mary Anne Redding, Senior Curator
Anna Reed
We Are Experiencing Technical Difficulties
2020
SARA ABBASPOUR
AUSTIN BRYANT
MATTHEW FINLEY
SOFIE HECHT
TRANSITIONAL REALMS
WHERE THEY STILL REMAIN
AN IMPOSSIBLY NORMAL LIFE
MATTER OF WHEN: STORIES OF NEW MEXICO’S DOWNWINDERS
ROBERT PLUMA
JOHN TROTTER
ANNA REED
Sara Abbaspour
Project Development Grant
Sara Abbaspour is an Iranian artist who lives and works between the U.S. and Iran. She holds an MFA in Photography from the Yale School of Art, an MA in Photography from the University of Tehran, and a B.Sc. in Urban Planning and Design from Ferdowsi University of Mashhad. Abbaspour is primarily interested in making visual poetry using portraiture and landscape. She has photographically reflected on the urban public sphere vs. private realms and interiors vs. exteriors as mental spaces. Exploring the notion of psycho-geography, her works exist in between the imagined and the experienced in the current socio-political climate.
Transitional Realms: My artistic inquiry delves into the essence of transitional states within spaces, inspired by the rich tapestry of Persian literature, particularly the poetry of Rumi, and informed by my background in urban studies. Against the backdrop of Iran's recent revolutionary movement for freedom and social justice, encapsulated by the rallying cry “Woman, Life, Freedom,” I find profound significance in exploring the liminal spaces that characterize our socio-political landscape.
Central to my practice is the exploration of spaces and their inhabitants as interconnected entities undergoing perpetual transformation. I am drawn to the nuanced interplay between vulnerability, intimacy, visibility, and history within these transitional states. Through photography, I endeavor to capture the ephemeral essence of these moments, where borders blur between the temporal and eternal, interior and exterior, personal and political.
Sara Abbaspour Untitled (Boy on the Couch) 2019
I aim to employ portraiture in a conceptual framework to delve deeper into the notion of the constant transitional moment. Through a series of black and white and color photographs, spanning portraits, cityscapes, landscapes, and still life paintings, I seek to articulate the fluidity of mental states as spaces evolve and intertwine.
Each image, while possessing individual narrative power, contributes to a larger visual tapestry that transcends the confines of traditional frames. Transitional Realms extends beyond the realm of isolated photographs, inviting viewers into a contemplative journey through sequences that challenge conventional notions of time and perception. By capturing the essence of transitions between interiors and exteriors, the project invites reflection on the mutable nature of existence and the intricate interplay between personal and political spheres.
Through my artistic practice, I aspire to facilitate a nuanced discourse on the fluidity of existence and the intricate interplay of spaces and identities. By transcending the confines of the visible, my work endeavors to illuminate the unseen threads that bind us in our collective journey of becoming.
Sara Abbaspour
Untitled (Boy with Mirrors on his Back)
Austin Bryant Project Launch Grant
Austin Bryant is a photographer and writer based in Boston, Massachusetts. His work concerns communities of color and the landscape on which they remain. Through intimate connections with both people and place, Bryant aims to memorialize the histories that have been forsaken or systematically erased.
Austin Bryant Untitled (Ship run Aground) 2023
These photographs are part of a larger project, Where They Still Remain, focusing on the African American and Wampanoag indigenous communities on the island of Martha’s Vineyard. The project was originally the basis of my thesis for the University of Hartford MFA in photography program, from which I graduated in August 2023.
Where They Still Remain focuses on the people of color who regard the island as a place of solace. There is a thriving Black community that has held the island sacred since before Emancipation; additionally there are the Indigenous Wampanoag people who have lived on the island they call “Noepe” for over 10,000 years. The communities share a deeply intertwined history, connected through marriage and family as well as a shared familiarity with persecution and displacement.
Where They Still Remain celebrates both the people and the landscape they have shared over the past several centuries. My aim is to evoke their spiritual connections. My relationship to the work and place is direct. As someone who has visited the island since I was a child and found comfort in seeing interracial and Black families like mine, I hold a similar feeling in terms of what this place represents.
I was inspired after hearing the 1854 story of Randall Burton. Burton was a Black man fleeing enslavement on Martha’s Vineyard after escaping from a nearby ship. He was discovered and aided by a Wampanoag woman named Beulah Vanderhoop. Vanderhoop gave Burton sanctuary in her home before securing him safe passage off-island where he then made it to freedom in Canada. Burton’s story was partially covered in the island’s newspaper as well as in tribal oral histories. Through active pursuit and happenstance, many of Vanderhoop’s descendants have become my photographic subjects. This story fueled my entry into the project but does not form a narrative basis and is not shared with the viewer.
In addition to my photographs, Where They Still Remain includes vernacular imagery of the island’s Black and Indigenous communities from the 19th and early 20th centuries through archival newspaper articles concerning stories of the enslaved (including Randall Burton) and the Indigenous on the island. Through redactions of these texts, I reinforce the body of work’s role as an unreliable narrator to an equally unreliable past due to erasure.
Matthew Finley
Personal Award
Matthew Finley uses his photography to express himself and connect to the world around him. With a variety of photography processes, he explores intimate emotions through gesture, line and performance to communicate his experience.
Growing up queer in an unaccepting environment, Finley felt disconnected from the world around him. Now, as an adult working through anxiety, the studio is a safe space to create where he can be vulnerable and express his true self. Creating and exhibiting his work is a way to forge relationships with viewers and help those who see themselves reflected in it to feel less alone. Finding inspiration in classic art and statuary, he addresses modern issues such as his coming out story, intimate relationships, and finding peace in our tumultuous world.
Based in Los Angeles, Finley’s work has shown in solo and group shows in multiple galleries across the U.S. including the Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles. Other works have circled the globe as part of the FOTOFILMIC 17 traveling exhibition. Finley has work in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College Chicago, The Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, and the Center for Fine Art Photography. His images have also appeared in publications including Oxford American, Shots Magazine, and Plates to Pixels where he won the Juror Award in The Visual Armistice 10th Annual Juried Showcase. Finley’s most current project, An Impossibly Normal Life, recently received Center Santa Fe’s 2024 Personal Award as well as the Center for Photographic Art’s 2024 LGBTQ+ Artist Grant.
Matthew Finley He has Arrived!
An Impossibly Normal Life: Imagine a world where it doesn’t matter who you love, just that you love.
An Impossibly Normal Life is an artifact from another world, a more loving, inclusive world where who you love is of little societal importance. This fictional story, centered on my imagined uncle’s idealized life, is created from collected vintage snapshots from around the world.
Four years ago, my mother offhandedly mentioned that I had an uncle who may have been gay, but he died not long after I was born. Hearing this revelation for the first time, nearly 30 years after I had struggled to come out to my disapproving family, sent my mind spinning. The thought of a family member so close to me going through some of the same things I did, inspired me to create this story.
Instead of returning to the hiding or shame of most pre-1970’s queer stories, a reality of how our world was, and in some cases, still is, I have created an alternate history where fluidity in gender and sexuality is the societal norm. Re-contextualizing found photographs and creating a new narrative, my Uncle Ken’s life becomes full of acceptance, friends, and love, and shows anyone struggling with identity today the joy of what could have been and can still be.
Matthew Finley Detail, Tracey Flirting with a Girl We Met on the Beach 2024
Sofie Hecht
Socially Engaged Award
Sofie Hecht is a documentary photographer born in Brooklyn, New York, and based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her work focuses on queer community, particularly collaborative portraiture, documenting drag performances, and returning home to photograph her own biological family. Hecht graduated summa cum laude from Tufts University in 2018 with a degree in International Literary and Visual Studies (ILVS) and Spanish. She moved to Albuquerque in 2019 where she began working for the non-profit youth group home Casa Q that supports queer youth without a safe home. Hecht then became a paralegal focused on civil rights lawsuits against prison and jails in support of the incarcerated. She enrolled in the International Center of Photography’s Documentary and Visual Practice online program for their 2023 school year where she began a longterm project documenting the effects of the nuclear industrial complex on New Mexican families, particularly those in the 50-mile radiation zone from the Trinity Site. Hecht also continues to work on a long-term documentary and portrait project The Queer Family Photobook about how queer people make alternative family units in Albuquerque. She is currently a Graduate Assistant at the University of New Mexico’s Communication and Journalism department.
Sofie Hecht Mudpies 2024
A Matter of When: Stories of New Mexico’s Downwinders: Detonated in Southern New Mexico on July 16, 1945, Trinity’s residual fallout traveled as far as Canada, Mexico, and 46 U.S. states. Half a million people lived within the primary 150 square-mile radiation zone of the world’s first atomic bomb. Eighty years later, the legacy of Trinity lives on in astounding rates of cancer and illness in these communities. A Matter of When: Stories of New Mexico’s Downwinders uses archival materiality—from family photographs, letters, documents, and interviews—to represent the deterioration of land and bodies exposed to radiation. It tells stories through portraits, oral histories, and a decaying family archive. As the archive itself shows signs of aging within an environment exposed to radiation, so too do the Downwinders. A Matter of When supplements the archive with new materials to breathe life into this decay.
In the past two years, I have focused on the communities in the closest 50-mile radius to Trinity. I have interviewed over 20 different families that suffer from illnesses they believe are connected to Trinity’s radiation fallout (radiogenic cancers, thyroid issues, fertility problems, vision impairments). I have spoken to fourth-generation cancer survivors who have lost children, granddaughters, parents, and neighbors to cancer. Many of these people are farmers whose primary food source comes from their own or neighbor’s gardens which are still contaminated. The Downwinders commonly say, “We don’t ask if we’re going to get cancer, we ask when.”
The Downwinders are still fighting to be included in the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act even after the bill sunset in June 2024. As the urgency of receiving financial support for an entire community’s suffering only increases, this is a project of
Sofie Hecht Untitled (Cows) 2024
Robert Pluma
Multimedia Award
Robert Pluma is a multidisciplinary artist, documentarian, and creative technologist dedicated to creating intimate, sensitive work to confront inequity and challenge meritless power. This work exists to generate shifts in perspective, examine our capacity for empathy, re-center the outliers, and corrode barriers diminishing our will to act.
Pluma’s practice extends beyond traditional media, reaching deeper into our physical and virtual worlds. He uses any means necessary to communicate and connect—photographs, moving images, written words, augmented reality, oral histories, ambient soundscapes, mixed-media sculpture, and electro-mechanical installations. He works with archives in his own practice and in support of others, as with the Tim Hetherington Trust when he created an archive of every page of Tim’s work notebooks.
Robert Pluma
From the series, Hidden Histories of San Antonio 2024
Hidden Histories of San Antonio is a reclamation of the identity and narrative of my Coahuiltecan Indigenous ancestors – a counter-history to colonial accounts of what is now southern Texas. It includes augmented reality, mesmerizing slow-motion portraiture, and recorded oral histories. It is a deeply personal, research-driven effort to challenge the very notion of history and how much truth we can expect to receive from its authors. An augmented reality mobile application opens a portal into non-linear exploratory storytelling, allowing participants to discover interwoven tales of migration, religion, colonization, and resilience – one fragment at a time.
I have created a site-specific visually driven augmented reality application centered at Mission San José, a UNESCO World Heritage Site my ancestors were coerced into building by Spanish colonists. It includes a more expansive look at the region’s history and present oral histories of the recent and distant past. It also includes expert testimonies, archival records, significant information about specific locations, and 3D scans of artifacts. This enables participants to encounter an essential retelling of the history of my people through an accessible, engaging, and revelatory experience.
In most historical examples of cultural erasure, there remain fragments of the people –symbols, songs, some words. The last generation to have lived on mission land will be gone soon – what do they remember which has never been recorded and will be forgotten if we don’t ask them? How can we visualize the memories of our ancestors?
Robert Pluma
Anna Reed
Me & Eve Award
Anna Reed is a Chicago-based artist whose work addresses the themes of identity, posthumanism, fragmentation, and the boundaries of virtual space. How and where do we exist? Born into Atari and grappling with AI, Reed is continually curious about the intersection of humanity and tech. Created through Xerox, scans, and other low-fi devices, she often uses her body as source images. The physical body confronts the screen and pushes the invisible boundary of human, device, and the virtual. Reed collaborates with machines and platforms alternating decisions as the works move from physical to digital and back again.
Anna Reed
: I grew up at the pivotal time of technological change. Landlines were replaced with cell phones, email replaced letters, inexpensive laptops replaced computer labs, and social media has since replaced everything else. Having lived with and without an online world, I began to question the nebulous boundaries between these modalities and to consider the points of intersection and overlap. Our media-saturated world shapes how we see and staring into a screen, acknowledged the haunting specter of surveillance, and felt the fear and anxiety
programs and felt comforting closeness of distant That representation is in turn being directly lived. Online programs track and store our behavior; we become code and algorithms. Do we have a human
project and consume our own images? Is our future already automated and curated for us? Do we have a choice in the formation we seek, or do we live in
low-tech devices, create intimate moments where technology and humanity converge. Vivid color and connection, isolation, closeness, and vulnerability –prompting us to question which of our versions of
Anna Reed Me, Me, More Me
John Trotter
A native of Missouri, John Trotter worked as a newspaper photojournalist for 14 years on stories large and small, local and international. He photographed people and events ranging from local high school athletes to national political conventions and documented the U.S. military interventions in Panama, Haiti, and Somalia.
On a spring day in 1997, while photographing in Sacramento, California for his staff job at The Sacramento Bee, at least six angry young men demanded his film, summarily beat, kicked, and stomped Trotter–leaving him for dead–bleeding on a sidewalk. He remembers almost none of the attack.
After months spent in a brain injury treatment residence relearning how to walk and remember, he returned to the scene of the crime with his camera to learn how to be a photographer again. Two years later, Life magazine published some of Trotter’s images, which led to a projection and onstage interview at the prestigious Visa Pour l’Image photojournalism festival in France. The pictures he made hoping to explain to himself what he experienced, along with artifacts from the investigation and prosecution of the crime, will be published as The Burden of Memory, by Red Hook Editions, later this year.
In 2000, Trotter felt recovered enough to move to New York. On March 24, 2001, in Mexico, the fourth anniversary of his attack, he took the first pictures for what has become a long-term, ongoing project focusing on the massive human alteration of the Colorado River, No Agua, No Vida. On the strength of that and other work, Trotter became a founding member of the Brussels-based collective photo agency, MAPS, in 2017.
Dry Riverbed, Baja California, Mexico 2014
John Trotter
Juan Butron at
No Agua No Vida: Since 2001, I have been photographing the consequences of the sweeping human alteration of the Colorado River in the Southwestern United States and Northwestern Mexico. The Colorado was greatly reduced from what it once was and no longer makes its ancient rendezvous with the Sea of Cortez, between the Baja California peninsula and the Mexican mainland.
Forces north of the border had other destinations planned for the river’s water and in 1922 divided its annual flow between seven U.S. States and Mexico. They built an extensive network of dams, stilling much of the once roiling river and creating the foundation on which the Southwestern United States has been built.
As it has turned out, the foundation of everything, the premise of 1922, was based more on wishful thinking than fact; up to 25% more water has been promised to the river’s users than actually exists.
No Agua No Vida has been an exploration of the disconnection many Americans have with the source of their water, one of the few things in the world without which we will not survive. Inevitably, our entire nation will pay for this hubris. Only the degree of sacrifice is still somewhat negotiable.
John Trotter
Stone and CAP Canal, Tucson, Arizona
In Anna Reed’s project Merging Dimensions she aims to “...create intimate moments where technology and humanity converge.” In her photos, we see body parts in glitchy environments, encouraging us to think more deeply about our relationship to technology.
Use found photographs of a human and an environment and follow these instructions for creating your own glitchy photo/image weaving:
Select two images that you want to weave together.
Cut one of your images into horizontal slices. They can be wide or narrow. Be careful to keep the slices in order.
Fold your second image in half. From the middle, cut vertical slits into your paper, leaving at least ¼ inch of paper at the edges. When you unfold your paper, make sure that your image has a border all the way around so your vertical slices don’t fall out.
Start weaving the horizontal slices into your second image.
Austin Bryant Untitled (House with Overgrown Wisteria)
Austin Bryant Untitled (Large Tree Landscape) 2022
Untitled (Spider Web in Dew)
Sara Abbaspour
Untitled (Girl Looking Down from the Rooftop)
Sara Abbaspour
Center / Website
Sara Abbaspour / Artist’s Website
Austin Bryant / Artist’s Website
Matthew Finley / Artist’s Website
Sofie Hecht / Artist’s Website
Robert Pluma / Artist’s Website
Anna Reed / Artist’s Website
John Trotter / Artist’s Website
Austin Bryant People in River, Red Wall Cavern, Grand Canyon
THANK YOU
FROM THE TURCHIN CENTER FOR THE VISUAL ARTS
The Turchin Center for the Visual Arts at Appalachian State University engages visitors from the university, community, nation and beyond in creating unique experiences through dynamic and accessible exhibition, education, outreach and collection programs. These programs inspire and support a lifelong engagement with the visual arts and create opportunities for participants to learn more about themselves and the world around them.
