“Untitled 49, Washington, D.C.” by New York photographer Jon Henry. The artist has won the 2020 Newman Prize for portraiture, given by Maine Media Workshops.
ROCKPORT — Maine Media Workshops + College has awarded the annual Arnold Newman Prize for portrait photography to New York artist Jon Henry. The $20,000 prize recognizes photographers with a compelling new vision and includes an exhibition at the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, Massachusetts. Henry’s work will be on view at the museum through Oct. 23, along with photographs of other finalists for the prize, Michael Darough, Rubén Salgado Escudero and Priya Kambli. An awards ceremony and reception will be Oct. 8.
Henry, who grew up in Queens and lives in Brooklyn, won the award on the strength of a series of portraits called “Stranger Fruit” created in response to the murders of Black men across America. In this series, Henry photographs mothers holding their sons, cradling their bodies in their arms as if they were victims of violence. He was named one of LensCulture’s Emerging Artists for 2019 and an En Foco Fellow for 2020, and has won the Film Photo Prize by Kodak. His work has been published and exhibited in numerous galleries, including at the Aperture Foundation. He is known for his cultural activism.
The prize is funded by the Arnold and Augusta Newman Foundation and administered by Maine Media Workshops. Newman, an influential photographer and educator, had a long association with the workshops, where he taught numerous classes over the years. The Newman foundation supports scholarships, media production, a lecture series, and the Arnold Newman Prize in Photographic Portraiture.
The foundation recently gave Maine Media $1.125 million, the largest philanthropic donation in the school’s history.
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