The Creator Labs Photo Fund, a new initiative providing a dedicated financial commitment to support artists in the wake of COVID-19, opened to all lens-based artists living in the US. Talented photographers shared between 8 and 10 images to share their stories, visions and creativity.

Following the national open call, Aperture selected twenty lens-based artists, each to receive a $5,000 award to sustain their work and practice. This fund is made possible through the support of Google Devices and Services, SN37 & Aperture.

Here is a look at the 20 finalists who have been featured in Creator Labs Photo Fund.

 

Miguel Limon | Chicago, 21 years

Perspectives on urban youth, Latindad, and environmental justice as well as the notions of memory, trauma and decoloniality are at the heart of Miguel’s questioning. His conceptual photography often includes the depictions of Latinx migrant narratives, Chicanx practices, mental illness, and heritage.

Miguel wishes to depict the perception of Latinx communities and use his practice as a means for collective and personal healing.

Knowing that the “objectivity” of photography is constantly changing and challenged, Miguel experiments with the rendering of mundane and quotidian imagery, critically pledged the thematic of beauty in art and fashion.

 

Arielle Gray | Alabama, 24 years

Inspired by the nostalgic warmth of Alabama summers, the world of film and the lived Black experience, Arielle Gray is shooting images through the lens of her daily life. The Alabama-based photographer has a BA in Studio Art and will be attending the Yale School of Art for her MFA in the fall of 2021.

 

Maximilan Thuemler | Brooklyn, 31 years

Born in Berlin and currently based in Brooklyn, Maximilan Thuemler’s creative works have been featured by numerous magazines and exhibited in various countries.

After having received a BFA in Illustration from Parsons School of Design, Maximilan Thuemler is using photography and its boundless archive to fraught the complex relationship to historical narratives of power, race and recognition.

 

Daveed Baptiste | New York, 24 years

Daveed is a multidisciplinary maker working in fashion design, photography, and textiles. As an immigrant – he moved from Haiti to American – and queer person, his work deepen the search of the multidimensional identities of the Caribbean diaspora living in the United States. His work decolonizes notions of race, gender and class within the Haitian community and greater Caribbean diaspora, are aimed through collaborations and various mediums.

 

Aaron Turner | Arkansas, 31 years

The educator and photographer, Aaron Turner uses photography to pursue personal stories of people of color in Arkansas and Mississippi Deltas. It is through his lens and his view camera that he develops still life creations on the topics of race, history and the role of the black artist.

 

Alana Perino | California, 32 years

From New York City and after having studied European Intellectual History and Photography at Wesleyan University, Alana Perino worked as a photojournalist in the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts territories. Returning to the United States, Alana continually have been completing several road trips across the country to photograph American landscapes as she seeks for land identity.

 

Tommy Kha | Brooklyn, 32 years

Currently based in Brooklyn, New York and Memphis, Tennessee, Tommy Kha is a Foam Talent, Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship and Hyères Photography Grand Prix finalist, and a former artist-in-residence at Light Work, Camera Club of New York and most recently Celebrate the Studio resident at International Studio and Curatorial Program. Tommy Kha holds an MFA in Photography from Yale University and performs, writes and appears in some films, including Laurie Simmons’s feature, My Art.

 

Allie Tsutoba | Massachusetts, 29 years

Allie Tsubota is a lens-based artist living and working between Providence, RI and central Massachusetts.Currently studying a Masters of Fine Arts in Photography at Rhode Island School of Design, she explores history of migration, assimilation, and racialization, as well as questions of national belonging and postmemory within Asian Americans and those of the Asian diaspora.

 

Priya Suresh Kambli | Missouri, 46 years

Kambli, Professor of Art at Truman State University in Kirksville, examines in her works the question “Did she belong to two different world?”, asked by her son Kavi at age three, as she spoke two languages. This question appeared to be the starting point of her work. The artist, thus, strives to understand the formation and erasure of identity that is an important part of the migrant experience, exploring the resulting fragmentation of family, identity and culture.

Winners of several Photograph awards, the success of Kambli’s work underlines the fact that she is engaged in an important dialogue and is willing to make her voice grow.

 

Naomieh Jovin | Philadelphia, 26 years

After having received her BFA in Photography and Digital Arts from Moore College of Art and Design, Naomieh Jovin is a visual artist with a focus in photography. The absence of her late mother and her origin – growing up Haitian-American – influenced her work. Combining photos from old family albums with her own photographs to recreate similar moments, allow Jovin to reflect her family history and paying tribute to generations before her, to counter erasure. This process is meant to illustrate resistance and intergenerational trauma and how we carry them through our bodies.

 

Shawn Bush | Wyoming, 34 years

Lens-based artist Shawn Bush grew up in Detroit, a city which influenced his work as it offers an American social and political landscape, full of history. His videos, photographs and in-camera large-format collages are responsive to the weakness of the system, and the fall of icons and mythologies.

 

Jasmine Clarke | Brooklyn, 25 years

After having graduated from Brad College with a BA in Photography, Jasmine Clarke, a Brooklyn-based photographer is inspired by the links between nature and spirituality. Her images depicts mainly the themes of identity, memory, and family history. She is also interested in dreams and magical realism, and likes to play with the contrast and tension that exists between fiction and reality, to create volatile and attractive images.

 

Matt Eich | Virginia, 35 years

The photographic essayist, Matt Eich, is working on long-form projects linked to memory, family, and community. His creative artworks, and printed photographs, held in the collections of different art galleries and exhibited in various museums, have been awarded from numerous prizes. Continuing his artistic works, Matt Eich also teaches at Corcoran School of the Arts and Design at The George Washington University.

 

Jasmine Veronica | Florida, 22 years

Jasmine Veronica is a Jamaican-American artist whose black and white photographs investigate the history and the representation of the Black female body. Ancient artworks about the history of the slave trade and auctions is at the heart of Jasmine Veronica’s research. Combining the pictured black women whom were forced to expose their body to the world back in the days, with Jasmine Veronica’s own personal experience in mind, the artist is using a camera to immerse herself in the extensive history. Her artistic process aims and seek to acknowledge this history and to recognize the subjects as an ongoing act of repression. Currently, she is focusing her work on Black women’s health, motherhood and the loss of one’s self in the act of being a mother.

 

Bryan Thomas | Brooklyn, 38 years

Graduating from Dartmouth College before returning to graduate school and earning his Master of Arts at Ohio University’s School of Visual Communication, Bryan Thomas worked for numerous magazines as a photographer. His most recent project “Sunrise/Sunset” is an ongoing portrait-based body of work that “visualizes the phenomenon of “Rest in Peace” t-shirts as a means of exploring the disproportionate toll and lingering effects of gun violence on African American communities in the United States”.

 

Giancarlo Montes Santangelo | Maryland, 25 years

Born and raised in Washington D.C., Giancarlo Montes Santangelo received a BFA in Photography from SUNY Purchase and hosted a conference at the SPE Conference in Philadelphia about the “Perils and Possibilities of Being Diverse”. His work consists of photographs, collages and writing about the queer body and the combination of political and historical stories that comes from it. His work questions coherence and acceptance.

 

Adraint Bereal | Brooklyn, 23 years

After graduating from a BFA Design at the University of Texas, Adraint Bereal, photographer and director based in Brooklyn exhibited his works in the George Washington Carver Museum in Austin. His first solo show was titled “1.7”, the ridiculous percentage of Black men on the U.T. Austin campus out of 52,000 students. The show included images and interviews from 25 Black men.

 

Jade Thiraswas | Louisiana, 28 years

The Thai-American visual storyteller, Jade Thiraswas was born in New Orleans, Louisiana and raised between there and Southeast Asia. Her works celebrate and questions the complex cultural identity, community while fighting against colonialism, patriarchy through classic documentary photographs. In close contact with her subjects, Jade Thiraswas challenges the notions of authority and subjectivity, artistically.

 

Sophie Lopez | Illinois, 22 years

Sophie Lopez is a Chicana and Orland Park-based artist who works with photography and sculpture to move out imperial histories through archives of her family. Her family is at the heart of her work and the narrative of her art to discuss the urgent need to “revitalize ‘the past’ and question dominant Euro-centrentic versions of history”.

 

Sydney Mieko King | Connecticut, 26 years

Born in San Francisco, Sydney Mieko King is an artist working primarily in large format photography. Her work explores the “physicality of photography, its relationship to the body and its potential to create new realities and histories”. After having graduated from Princeton University with a magna cum laude, in Art and Archaeology, Sydney Mieko King is currently an MFA candidate at the Yale School of Art.