The 2023 Silver List includes 24 photographers selected by nearly 100 curators, educators, publishers, and researchers working in photography in North America.
Respondents to the 2023 Silver List were asked to list up to ten artists working in or with photography, with 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 living and early in their career (however they define it)
Artists who have previously been named to the Silver List are not included in this year’s list.
The resulting list of 24 artists represents the most frequently recommended artists. Collectively they represent a range of approaches to photography, and different ways of engaging with art discourses, contemporary concerns, and personal expression. The artists on the list represent an amazing range of approaches to photography.
The Silver List was originally inspired by The Black List, Franklin Leonard’s resource platform for screenwriters that “began as an annual survey of Hollywood’s most-liked unproduced screenplays”. In 2020, Gems Wang, then a Carnegie Mellon University undergraduate majoring in statistics and machine learning, and minoring in photography, suggested to their instructor, Silver Eye’s then-executive director David Oresick, that a model similar to The Black List could be applied to emerging contemporary art photographers, helping them to gain exposure and potentially opportunity. The Silver List was created as a collaboration between Wang, Oresick, Leonard, and Professor of Statistics Joseph Kadane.
The 2023 Silver List is the third instance of the survey. By identifying emerging photographers, the Silver List seeks to give the artists exposure, to invite curators, educators, and publishers to participate in a collective conversation about the trajectories of contemporary photography and to create visibility for historically underrepresented artists, and to give the public an opportunity to see work that photography professionals consider to be exciting, important, and meaningful.
We are grateful to the generous guidance and assistance in the development of this project from Franklin Leonard, the founder of The Black List, Joseph B. Kadane, the Leonard J. Savage University Professor of Statistics and Social Sciences Emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University, David Oresick, former Executive Director of Silver Eye and Kate Kelley, former Deputy Director of Silver Eye.
