A six-letter word for…, 2011. Photograph by Nadia Sablin.
The CDS/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography is a biennial prize that offers publication of a book of photography, a $3,000 award, and inclusion in a website devoted to presenting the work of winners of the prize. Each year a significant and innovative artist, curator, or writer in photography is chosen to judge the prize and write an introduction to the winning book.
In the months preceding the 2016 prize’s submission deadline, we’re taking a look back at previous winners. Freelance photographer Nadia Sablin was chosen by renowned curator and historian Sandra S. Phillips to win the 2014 First Book Prize for her color series Aunties. The images document, as Sablin writes, “the lives of my aunts who live in Northwest Russia. Alevtina and Ludmila are in their seventies but carry on the traditional Russian way of life, chopping wood for heating the house, bringing water from the well, planting potatoes, and making their own clothes.” First Book Prize judge Sandra S. Phillips, senior curator of photography at SFMOMA, described Sabin’s photographs as “wonderful and sophisticated. . . . The two sisters seem to exist in a privileged reality, one closer to the warm smell of strawberries in summer.” Scroll down to watch a video and interview with Nadia Sablin about her prizewinning project, and go to firstbookprizephoto.com/photogalleries to view work by all past winners.
Nadia Sablin
“I took pictures during my first visit–I had an idea to shoot a ‘little story,'” said Sablin. “But once I started, I knew I had to keep going, that I wanted to capture the larger experience of being with them, in the house, in the village. Taking pictures was also a way to reintroduce myself to my aunts–to share what I do. The village, my aunts’ house, is where books became real to me, as real as my own life. And my aunts’ life is so bound to the cyclical nature of things. The photographs need to have a beginning, middle, and end. They are story. That needs to be tangible, tat you can hold in your hands and feel. An exhibit isn’t intimate or friendly. That’s what a book is for.”
Submissions for the eighth CDS/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography are now being accepted through September 15, 2016. Peter Barberie, the Brodsky Curator of Photographs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, will be this year’s prize judge. Melissa Harris, editor-in-chief of the Aperture Foundation, will chair the selection committee that chooses the finalists.
