Silver Eye

International Award
Tim Carpenter: The ancien régime

Keystone Award
Rebecca Arthur: The House That Built Me

Fellowship is Silver Eye's international juried photography competition. For eighteen years this competition has recognized both rising talent and established photographers from all corners of the globe, and from the state of Pennsylvania. This year, Silver Eye received over two hundred submissions of creative, challenging photography. The International Prize is awarded to an artist working within the United States or abroad, and the Keystone Award is given to an artist working and living within the state of Pennsylvania. The prizes were selected by Chris McCall, Executive Director of Pier 24 in San Francisco, CA and Jessica Beck, Milton Fine Curator of Art at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, PA.

Tim Carpenter was chosen as this year's International Prize winner. His project, The ancien régime, took form when he recognized a certain quality of black and white film negatives made in the heat and humidity of central Illinois in July and August. The blown-out skies and general haziness reminded him of a number of Eugène Atget’s prints of Paris around the turn of the twentieth century. Carpenter decided to make pictures of the formal interactions between plants, trees, buildings and other structures and uses these images to consider what is timeless and “ancient” and what is more ephemeral, like a “regime.”

Rebecca Arthur was selected as this year's Keystone Award Winner for her project The House That Built Me. After the passing of Arthur’s mother in the summer of 2014, she and her family and grieved separately. Arthur had left home for school used the time away from her family as a reason to forget about the home that shaped her. After a few years, she felt the need to reconnect with her siblings and stepfather. When her sister had a son, she began to create images that depicted the new family dynamics–the loss of the matriarch the addition of her new nephew. The House That Built Me shows a new beginning and a family striving to stay together.

Participating Artists

1. Rebecca Arthur is a photographer currently serving as an AmeriCorps member in Philadelphia, PA, teaching photography to high school students in a Title I school. She completed her BFA in photography at NYU in 2014.

2. Tim Carpenter is a photographer and writer who works in Brooklyn and central Illinois. He received an MFA in Photography from the Hartford Art School in 2012, and later that year co-founded TIS books, an independent photobook publisher.