This Friday —that is, tomorrow— the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum will honor its 2023 class of Photography Hall of Fame Inductees and Awardees in a virtual ceremony at 6p.m. CST. An annual occurrence since the IPHF first opened its doors fifty-eight years ago, these awards are given to photographers and industry visionaries for their artistry, innovation, and contributions to photography both as an art and as a science.
Significant innovators in their respective fields —according to not only to the IPHF (and common sense) — are none other than Nan Goldin, Vivian Maier, and Bea Nettles, in addition to Matika Wilbur, honored with the IPHF Visionary Awards as women photographers.
The Honorees
Frankly, as a street photographer who also happens to be part of an, ahem, certain subculture, the most shocking thing about this year’s honorees is the fact that it took so long for the IPHF to recognize their work.
We’re talking about Vivian Maier, one of the most prolific street photographers of the twentieth century, whose work we’ve been able to see thanks to serendipity and good luck. We’re talking about Nan Goldin, whose work within the LGBT community shed light on both its happiness and its tragedies; her opus The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, captured moments of love and loss in the post-Stonewall era; sex, drug use, dance clubs, domestic violence, AIDS and more are portrayed candidly and powerfully in this must-see piece.
Vivian Maier
Vivian Maier was an American street photographer whose massive, unseen body of work came to light when it was purchased at an auction in Chicago, in 2007.
Born in New York City, she spent some of her youth in France and then worked in Chicago as a nanny and caregiver for most of her life. In her spare time, however, Maier ventured into the art of photography. Consistently taking photographs over the course of five decades, she would ultimately leave behind over 100,000 negatives.
Nan Goldin
Nancy Goldin, is an American photographer and activist whose work has explored LGBT subcultures, the HIV/AIDS crisis, the opioid epidemic and various moments of intimacy, as stated before.
She’s a founding member of the advocacy group P.A.I.N —Prescription Addiction Intervention Now— and she lives and works in New York City.
Bea Nettles
Bea Nettles explores the narrative potential of photography through constructed images often made with alternative photographic processes. Combining craft and photography, Nettles’s work makes use of wide-ranging tools and materials, including fabric and stitching, instamatic cameras, the book format, manually applied color, and hand‐coated photographic emulsions. Her imagery evokes metaphors that reference key stages in the lives of women, often with autobiographic undertones, and her key motifs draw upon mythology, family, motherhood, place, landscape, dreams, aging, and the passage of time.
Matika Wilbur
Matika Wilbur is a critically acclaimed social documentarian and photographer from the Swinomish and Tulalip peoples of coastal Washington. Project 562, a crowd-funded initiative to visit, engage, and photograph people from over 562 sovereign Tribal Nations in North America, is her fourth major creative venture elevating Native American identity and culture. She co-hosts the All My Relations podcast with Dr. Adrienne Keene as a platform that invites guests to delve into subjects facing Native peoples today and explore the connections between land, non-human relatives, and one another.
