The Photo Review: Best of Show 2023
About the Exhibition
This exhibition presents the work of the fifteen prizewinners of the 2023 International Photography Competition, organized annually by Photo Review, a critical journal of national scope and international readership. The prizewinners were chosen by juror Deborah Willis from more than 1,300 entries. Willis’s selections range from classical subjects such as architecture, landscape, and portraiture, to conceptual images and even AI-prompted photographs. Black life, women, beauty, and LGBTQ+ subjects are also well represented.
About the Photo Review
Since its founding in 1976, Photo Review has highlighted the work of women, artists of color, and young and emerging artists in particular, and has promoted photography to a wide and culturally diverse audience. Its annual competition, first held in 1985, attracts submissions from established and aspiring photographers. Prizewinning works have been acquired by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Haverford College. In addition, since 2002, prizewinners’ images have been exhibited at important venues including Philadelphia’s University of the Arts and the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center (now TILT Institute for the Contemporary Image).
About the juror
Deborah Willis, Ph.D., is University Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. She is also the director of NYU’s Center for Black Visual Culture at the Institute for African American Affairs. Her research examines photography’s multifaceted histories, visual culture, contemporary women photographers, and beauty. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. She is the recipient of the College Art Association Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art, the Royal Photographic Society Outstanding Service Award, and the Don Tyson Prize for the Advancement of American Art.
Among her writings are The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship and Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present. She has curated exhibitions at YoungArts in Miami, the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, the Maryland Institute College of Art, and the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati. She is the 2023 Mary Lucille Dauray Artist-in-Residence at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach.
Exhibition events
Saturday, September 9 | 1-3 p.m.
FREE
Please join us for an opening reception celebrating the Photo Review: Best of Show 2023 on Saturday, September 9th from 1-3 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.
