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October Issue 2005

Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University in Durham, NC, Offers Retrospective on Lange-Taylor Award

The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University in Durham, NC, is presenting the exhibition, Hand & Eye: Fifteen Years of the Dorothea Lange ­ Paul Taylor Prize, on view through Jan. 8, 2006, in the Juanita Kreps and Lyndhurst Galleries.

Hand & Eye: Fifteen Years of the Dorothea Lange­Paul Taylor Prize features photographs and writing from ten past prizewinning projects, showing a broad range of documentary work from the United States and a number of places around the world. Projects range in focus from Salvadoran street gangs to Italy's new immigrants, from America's toughest boxing gyms to highway construction in remote Appalachia, from mountain Jews in Azerbaijan to post-Soviet transition in Cuba.

The exhibit is featuring works by photographer Peter Brown, recipient of the 2005 Lange­Taylor Prize with writer Kent Haruf along with the recipients from the past ten years including: Rob Amberg - Sam Gray (1998); Ernesto Bazan - Silvana Paternostro (1997); Mary Berridge - River Huston (1996); Donna DeCesare - Luis Rodriguez (1993); Jason Eskenazi - Jennifer Gould Keil (1999); Paola Ferrario - Mary Capello (2001); Misty Keasler - Charles D'Ambrosio (2003); Jim Lommasson - Katherine Dunn (2004); Deborah Luster - C.D. Wright (2000); and Dona Ann McAdams - Brad Kessler (2002).

First awarded in 1991, the Dorothea Lange­Paul Taylor Prize was created by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University to encourage collaboration between documentary writers and photographers in the tradition of the acclaimed photographer Dorothea Lange and writer and social scientist Paul Taylor. In 1941 Lange and Taylor published An American Exodus, a book that renders human experience eloquently in text and images and remains a seminal work in documentary studies. The Lange­Taylor Prize honors their important collaborative work.

Peter Brown and Kent Haruf won this year's prize for their project High Plains, a new description of America's central High Plains - the Sand Hills of Nebraska, south to southern Colorado. Brown's photographs and Haruf's writing will record "moments that describe the beauty, power, tragedy, and cultural complexity of the place itself: the way the land has been used, the way that people have lived on it, and the visual record that has been left behind."

Brown was named Photographer/Educator of the Year by the Houston Center of Photography in 2004. He has also received an Alfred Eisenstadt Award, an Imogene Cunningham Award, a Carnegie Fellowship, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Brown's work is held in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts and the Menil Collection, Houston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the J. Paul Getty Museum; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, among other institutions. His monograph, On the Plains, was published by Norton/Center for Documentary Studies (1999).

For further information check our NC Institutional Gallery listings, call the Center at 919/660-3663 or at (cds.aas.duke.edu).

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