Robert Gardner Fellowship

Manifest | Thirteen Colonies is a photographic project and journey through the repositories of African American material culture found in libraries, museums, and archives of the original thirteen English colonies and Washington, DC. Conceived by photographer Wendel A. White, this project is a personal reliquary of the remarkable evidence of Black agency and racial oppression stored in public collections. Accompanying his imagery, White discusses his approach to finding, selecting, and photographing artifacts—from rare singular objects to more quotidian materials—and highlights their significance as forensic evidence of Black life and history in the United States. 

Manifest: Thirteen Colonies will be open to the public at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, Harvard University from May 18, 2024-April 13, 2025.

Wendel A. White (b. 1956, Newark, NJ) is currently Distinguished Professor of Art at Stockton University and has taught photography at the School of Visual Arts; The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art; the International Center of Photography; and the Rochester Institute of Technology. His work has received various awards and fellowships, including: Doctor of Arts (hc), Oakland University; Robert Gardner Fellow in Photography, Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, Harvard University; John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in Photography; Bunn Lectureship in Photography, Bradley University; three artist fellowships from the New Jersey State Council for the Arts; Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts; and New Works Photography Fellowship from En Foco Inc. His work is represented in museum and corporate collections, including the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; and Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL; among many others.

 

In his project Community Fire, the photographer Zhang Xiao takes a local, hometown look at Shehuo (社火), a Chinese Spring Festival tradition celebrated in rural northern Chinese communities, including temple fairs, dragon dances, and storytelling. Shehuo—literally, “community fire”—is devoted to the worship of land and fire, and boasts a history of many thousands of years. During the festival, people hold ceremonies, pray for the next year’s good harvest, and confer blessings of peace and safety for all family members. 

However, what was once a heterogeneous cultural tradition with myriad regional variations has largely become a tourist-facing, consumption-oriented enterprise. In the early 2000s, Shehuo received an “intangible cultural heritage” designation from the People’s Republic of China, resulting in increased funding in exchange for greater government involvement. While transforming the practitioners’ relation to Shehuo, this change expresses itself most visually in the way Qing dynasty–era costumes and props have been replaced with newer, cheaper products from online shopping websites. Zhang’s photographs capture how these mass-produced substitutions have transformed the practice of Shehuo. Through a colorful and fantastical blend of portraiture and ephemera that documents the blurred edges between the everyday and the absurd, Community Fire is a dynamic visual exploration of one of China’s oldest traditions. 

Copublished by Aperture and Peabody Museum Press

Caspian: The Elements is Chloe Dewe Mathews’s record of five years spent roaming the borderlands of the Caspian Sea. In a resource-rich region roiled by contested geopolitics, Dewe Mathews found that elemental materials like oil, rock, and uranium are central to the mystical, practical, artistic, religious, and therapeutic aspects of daily life. With essays by Morad Montazami, Sean O’Hagan, and Arnold van Bruggen, Caspian: The Elements offers a series of powerful visual narratives that explore the deep links between the peoples of the Caspian and their enigmatic and coveted landscapes.

First Place, 2017 New England Book Show (General Trade, Illustrated)

First Place, 2017 NEMA Awards (Books)

Miki Kratsman has worked as a photojournalist in the Palestinian Occupied Territories for over three decades. Originally created in the context of daily news, his tens of thousands of photographs have, in retrospect, taken on fascinating new meanings, as bystanders become protagonists and peripheral details move to the center. Isolated from the original frame, cropped, enlarged, and redisplayed, the reimagined images ask us to explore the limits of the observer’s gaze under conditions of occupation.

Kratsman’s photographs look at both “wanted men”—individuals sought by the Israeli state—and the everyman and everywoman on the street who, by virtue of being Palestinian in a particular time and place, can be seen as a “suspect.” The work is both transgressive and banal, crossing boundaries between Israel and Palestine, “wanted” and “innocent,” street photography and surveillance imagery. Kratsman has also provoked vital, long-term interaction around the images on social media, creating a Facebook page on which viewers are invited to identify the individuals portrayed and comment on their “fate.” His complex project is chronicled in this book in more than 300 images that powerfully implicate the viewer as we follow the gaze of both occupier and occupied within a complex web of power relations around issues of life and death.

A thought-provoking text by Ariella Azoulay engages intimately with Kratsman’s images. Looking at various models of historical and civil construction of the gaze, Azoulay explores the ways in which the shadow of death is an actual threat that hovers over Kratsman’s photographed persons and frames both individuals and the borrowed time within which they exist.

A supplemental booklet contains hundreds of portraits and evocative messages from Kratsman’s Facebook proj

Preface by Robert Gardner

Essay by Charles Ramble

Third Place, 2015 New England Book Show (Cover)

Photographer Kevin Bubriski has been visually documenting the country and people of Nepal since his first visit in 1975. Sent as a young Peace Corps volunteer to the northwest Karnali Zone, the country’s remotest and most economically depressed region, he spent three years walking the length and breadth of the Karnali, planning and overseeing construction of gravity flow drinking water pipelines. He also photographed the local villagers, producing an extraordinary series of 35mm and large format black-and-white images. For nearly four decades, Bubriski has maintained his close association with Nepal and its people. Both visual anthropology and cultural history, this remarkable body of photographic work documents Nepal’s evolution from a traditional Himalayan kingdom to a rapidly changing, globalized society. Nepal: 1975–2011 also offers an incisive and comprehensive look at the aesthetic evolution of an important contemporary photographer.

Kevin Bubriski is Assistant Professor of Photography at Green Mountain College in Poultney, Vermont, and was the 2010 recipient of the Robert Gardner Visiting Artist Fellowship at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University.

Co-published with Radius Books.

Foreword by Robert Gardner
Essay by Bob Connolly

"Best Books 2013...The attraction of Dupont's books is that his photographs exhibit enormous passion and enthusiasm and are an effort to unlock the nature of the relationship between photographer and subject."
—THE Magazine

This publication records acclaimed Australian photographer Stephen Dupont’s journey through some of Papua New Guinea’s (PNG) most important cultural and historical zones: the Highlands, Sepik, Bougainville, and the capital city of Port Moresby. Through images and personal diaries, Dupont’s remarkable body of work captures the human spirit of the people of PNG in their transition from tribalism to globalization. The project was conducted in 2011 with the support of the Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography given by Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology.

Piksa Niugini consists of two hardcover books inside a special slipcase. The first volume is a collection of portraits in luscious duotone and 4-color reproduction; the second is a vibrant collection of the diaries, drawings, contact sheets, and documentary photographs that chronicle Dupont’s experience and working process and richly contextualize the more formal images in volume one. An exhibition of Dupont's New Guinea photographs is on display at the Peabody through September 2, 2013.

Dupont’s photographs have received international acclaim for their artistic integrity and valuable insight into peoples, cultures, and communities that are under threat or in the process of rapid change. The photographer’s many awards include a Robert Capa Gold Medal citation from the Overseas Press Club of America, a Bayeux War Correspondent’s Prize, and first places in the World Press Photo, Pictures of the Year International, the Australian Walkleys, and Leica/CCP Documentary Award. In 2007 Dupont was the recipient of the W. Eugene Smith Grant for Humanistic Photography for his ongoing project on Afghanistan. His work has been featured in The New Yorker, Aperture, Newsweek, GQ, French and German GEO, Le Figaro, Liberation, The Sunday Times Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Stern, Time, and Vanity Fair.

by Dayanita Singh

Finalist, 2012 New England Book Show (Pictorial)

House of Love is a work of photo fiction by Dayanita Singh. Working closely with the writer, Aveek Sen, whose prose follows a journey of its own, Singh explores the relationships among photography, memory, and writing. House of Love, designed to blur the lines between an art book of photographic images and a work of literary fiction, is a book whose images demand to be read, not just seen, and whose texts create their own sensory worlds. The combination creates a new vocabulary for the visual book.

The “House of Love” itself is the Taj Mahal, but the Taj Mahal is a recurring motif that stands for a range of meanings — meanings made up of the truths and lies of night and day, love and illusion, attachment and detachment. Through images of cities both visible and invisible, of people real and surreal, Singh creates her own mysterious and ineffable, strange yet familiar language, using her trademark black-and-white photography and her newer nocturnal color work.

Dayanita Singh was born in New Delhi in 1961. She studied at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad and later concentrated on photojournalism and documentary photography at the International Center of Photography in New York. Her photos have been exhibited many times, most recently at the Venice Biennale 2011. Singh’s books include, Myself Mona Ahmed, Privacy, Go Away Closer, Sent a Letter, Blue book, Dream Villa and Dayanita Singh. She lives in New Delhi.

Aveek Sen is a senior assistant editor (editorial pages) of The Telegraph, Calcutta, where he has written extensively on photography. He was a Rhodes Scholar at University College, Oxford, where he studied English literature, before going on to teach English at St Hilda’s College, Oxford. He is the winner of the 2009 International Center for Photography Infinity Award for Writing on Photography.

Winner, 2009 New England Book Show (General Trade, Illustrated)

Silver Medal, 2010 IPPY Awards (Multicultural Non-Fiction Adult)

Silver Medal, 2010 IPPY Awards (Religion & Multi-Cultural)

Bronze Medal, 2009 Foreword Magazine Awards (Religion)

With essays by Ali S. Asani, Carl W. Ernst, and Kamil Khan Mumtaz

Sufism, the mystical path of Islam, is a key feature of the complex Islamic culture of South Asia today. Influenced by philosophies and traditions from other Muslim lands and by pre-Islamic rites and practices, Sufism offers a corrective to the image of Islam as monolithic and uniform.

In Sacred Spaces, Pakistani artist and educator Samina Quraeshi provides a locally inflected vision of Islam in South Asia that is enriched by art and by a female perspective on the diversity of Islamic expressions of faith. A unique account of a journey through the author’s childhood homeland in search of the wisdom of the Sufis, the book reveals the deeply spiritual nature of major centers of Sufism in the central and northwestern heartlands of South Asia. Illuminating essays by Ali S. Asani, Carl W. Ernst, and Kamil Khan Mumtaz provide context to the journey, discussing aspects of Sufi music and dance, the role of Sufism in current South Asian culture and politics, and the spiritual geometry of Sufi architecture.

Quraeshi relies on memory, storytelling, and image making to create an imaginative personal history using a rich body of photographs and works of art to reflect the seeking heart of the Sufi way and to demonstrate the diversity of this global religion. Her vision builds on the centuries-old Sufi tradition of mystical messages of love, freedom, and tolerance that continue to offer the promise of building cultural and spiritual bridges between peoples of different faiths.

Samina Quraeshi is Gardner Fellow and Visiting Artist, Peabody Museum, Harvard University.

Ali S. Asani is Professor of Indo-Muslim and Islamic Religion and Cultures and Director of the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Islamic Studies Program, with a joint appointment in the Committee on the Study of Religion and the Departments of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations; Sanskrit and Indian Studies; and African and African-American Studies, at Harvard University.

Carl W. Ernst is William R. Kenan, Jr., Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Kamil Khan Mumtaz is an architect living in Pakistan.

Foreword by Robert Gardner

“Guy Tillim … combines a profound sense of historic documentation of African countries ravaged by conflicts and tragedies of all kinds and a very stringent formal aesthetic devoid of all mannerism.”'
—Michket Krifa

As the first recipient of the Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography at the Peabody Museum, Guy Tillim traveled through Angola, Mozambique, Congo, and Madagascar, documenting the grand colonial architecture and how it has become part of a contemporary African stage. His photographs reveal the decay and detritus of colonialism in Western and Southern Africa and convey an acute sense of humanity.

Tillim is an award-winning photographer from South Africa. His photographic documentation of social conflict and inequality in the countries of Africa has been exhibited in more than a dozen countries and widely published.

Co-published with Prestel Verlag.