Silver Eye

Silver Eye has supported vital new voices in contemporary photography through Fellowship, our annual international juried photography competition, for over twenty years. Taking the Fellowship 24 competition as a point of departure, this exhibition reflects the unique perspectives of this year's artists. Works in this exhibition speak to the power of devotion in many forms, place as an intersection of personal, social, and political concerns, and visual language as a means to new narratives.

With care and dedication, Rachael Banks has photographed her family in the Knobs and Bluegrass regions of Central Kentucky for over ten years. Her work expresses intertwined cycles of life and loss between nature and familial generations and challenges narrow representations of this region. Vikesh Kapoor expresses his mother's unwavering devotion to her community as an OBGYN through layered approaches to storytelling. Weaving contemporary works with family album photographs and archival material, Vikesh Kapoor reflects upon her legacy within her small town and beyond.

Both William Camargo and Anna Rotty use photography to encourage dialogue on urgent social issues. William Camargo's work examines issues of gentrification in his hometown of Anaheim, California, elevating Chicanx/Latinx histories in this city. In doing so, Camargo responds to esteemed Californian photographers who shaped the medium before him. Anna Rotty examines her relationship with water and its shifting social significance by creating unique installations and photographs. These connect her personal history and concerns around climate change and civic infrastructures.

Several of the artists of Fellowship 24 ask how photography can be a powerful tool to claim space figuratively and conceptually. This necessitates dismantling art history and photography's presumed authority. Xavier Scott Marshall reimagines centuries of Christian iconography to create large-format black-and-white photographs that center Black experience and change perceptions of religious image-making. Anthony Francis exposes, redirects, and transforms foundational assumptions about photography, such as pose and gesture, to elevate individual agency and create potent spaces for imagination.

Fellowship 24 reflects Silver Eye's mission to support contemporary photography that addresses contemporary artistic and social concerns, often in dialogue with the medium's past. We are grateful to our jurors Zora J Murff, Aline Smithson, and Jeremiah William McCarthy, and to the artists for the opportunity to collaborate to realize their visions.

Participating Artists

1. Rachael Banks lives in Northern Kentucky. She is an artist and educator. Her research interests include folklore, ecology, and epigenetics. Rachael's work addresses trauma and nature as central to relationships and experiences with her community. She compulsively photographs deer and black dogs. In 2024, she received a Fellowship honorable mention in Silver Eye's annual photography competition.

2. William Camargo is a California based artist and educator, who holds an MFA from Claremont Graduate University and is the founder and curator of Latinx Diaspora Archives. His work has been shown at the Chicago Cultural Center, The Cooper Gallery of African and African American Arts at Harvard and Filter Photo, among others. In 2024, he received a Fellowship award in Silver Eye's annual photography competition.

3. Anthony Francis is a multifaceted visual artist filmmaker, educator, and writer based in San Antonio, Texas. After receiving an English degree and going on to earn a M.Ed from The George Washington University, he studied at the Academy of Art University to gain an MFA with a concentration in photography. His work and research interests are concerned with opacity, love, and portraiture's politics connected to the photographic apparatus. He has spoken and shown work internationally and his work is in private and public collections. In 2024, he received a Fellowship award in Silver Eye's annual photography competition.

4. Vikesh Kapoor is a multidisciplinary artist whose work examines race, class and identity as a first-generation American. Kapoor has exhibited his series “See You at Home” in solo exhibitions at The Print Center, Philadelphia PA; Filter Space, Chicago, IL; and New Orleans Photo Alliance Gallery, LA. Kapoor is currently a fellow in the inaugural Google Image Equity Fellowship, with partners For Freedoms, Aperture Foundation, Free the Work and Creative Theory Agency. In 2024, he received the Keystone Award in Silver Eye's annual photography competition, which recognizes an artist making exceptional work in Pennsylvania.

5. Xavier Scott Marshall is a first-generation Trinidadian-American artist. Xavier’s large format black and white images of decontextualized Christian icons, saints, and martyrs across various cities in the US and Europe reflect the colonial history of religious image-making to question and draw parallels between visual history and the black condition. His hand-processed film images bare the blemishes of the medium, with scratches and marks speaking to the honesty and fragility of his process and the subjects in his photographs. In 2024, he received a Keystone Award honorable mention in Silver Eye's annual photography competition. This was made in recognition of his outstanding work made in Pennsylvania.

6. Anna Rotty investigates water, light, and infrastructure, informing her understanding of orientation and place. By constructing landscapes and making light a priority, Anna looks to highlight the intangible and emotional aspects of the world. She is currently an MFA candidate and instructor of record in photography at the University of New Mexico on Tiwa land known as Albuquerque. In 2024, she received a Fellowship honorable mention in Silver Eye's annual photography competition.