The Silver List was compiled from the suggestions of over 125 nonprofit photography curators, scholars, publishers and critics.
We asked them to list up to ten artists who fit the following criteria:
They love the artist’s work and feel it should be seen more widely
The artist uses the medium of photography (however they define it)
The artist is early in their career (however they define it)
The Silver List contains the artists who were suggested the most times, and it is organized randomly. Our hope is that this methodology will spotlight outstanding, diverse, and sometimes overlooked artists for a broad new audience.
This is not Silver Eye’s “best of” list. It is a snapshot, taken in the Fall of 2021, that shows the thoughts of a professional community who cares deeply about contemporary photography.
The idea for this survey was adapted from The Black List, which has applied this methodology to screenplays since 2005.
The Silver List is a partnership between Silver Eye Center for Photography, The Black List, and Carnegie Mellon University. The idea for the Silver List came from James Thomas "Gems" Wang, a senior studying Statistics & Machine Learning, and Photography at Carnegie Mellon University. Generous guidance and assistance for this project came from Franklin Leonard, the founder of The Black List and Joseph B. Kadane, the Leonard J. Savage University Professor of Statistics and Social Sciences Emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University.
