The Hasselblad Foundation has announced that the cult British photographer Paul Graham is the recipient of the 2012 Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography. The prize is SEK 1,000,000 (approximately GBP 95,000, US $150,000), The award ceremony took place in London on March 8, 2012. An exhibition of his work, Paul Graham – 2012 Hasselblad Award Winner will open on October 26, 2012 at the Hasselblad Center at the Gothenburg Museum of Art, Sweden, in connection with which, one or more seminars will be arranged with the award winner.
The Foundation’s citation regarding the decision to award the 2012 prize to Paul Graham is as follows:
Paul Graham is one of the most brilliant photographers of his generation. During the course of his nearly 40-year career, he has presented an extremely focused body of work, at once perfectly coherent and never monotonous. In images both sensitive and subtly political, he makes tangible the insignificant traces of ″the spirit of the times″ we do not normally see. With his keen awareness of the photographic medium, he has constantly developed innovative forms of working with all aspects of photography. This makes him a profound force for renewal of the deep photographic tradition of engagement with the world.
This year’s award committee, which submitted its proposal to the Foundation’s board of directors, consisted of:
- Clément Chéroux (chair), Photography Historian, Curator Department of Photograpy, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France,
- Ekaterina Degot, Art Historian, Art Critic and Curator, Moscow, Russia
- Ute Eskildsen, Professor, Head of the Department of Photography and Vice-Director, Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany.
- Gao Shiming, Curator, School of Intermedia Art, China Art Academy, Hangzhou, PR China,
- Roberta Valtorta, Scientific Director, Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea, Milan, Italy Paul Graham was born 1956. He is an English fine-art photographer whose work has been exhibited, published and collected internationally. In 2009, he won the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. He is also a Winston Churchill Memorial Fellow (1983), and a Guggenheim Fellow (2010)has been a prolific and well published artist, including two survey monographs, by SteidlMACK (2009) and Phaidon (1996), along with 10 other publications. One book, Empty Heaven, is devoted to Japan,another A Shimmer of Possibility, comprises 12 volumes examining the USA. His work has been exhibited extensively – notably participating in the Italian Pavilion of the 49th Venice Biennale (2001), the inaugural exhibition at Switzerland’s national Fotomuseum Winterthur, and most recently a solo exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. He was one of the 24 photographers included in the Tate Gallery’s landmark “Cruel and Tender” survey exhibition of 20th century photography (2003), and a European mid career survey exhibition at Museum Folkwang, Essen, and touring from 2009–2011 to the Deichtorhallen, Germany, and Whitechapel Gallery, London.