Sablin's description: "Aunties is a series of photographs detailing the lives of two unmarried sisters living in a Russian village. Alevtina and Ludmila are in their seventies, but carry on the traditional way of life, chopping wood for heating the house, bringing water from the well, and making their own clothes. Vegetables they harvest in the fall and berries they gather in the summer supplement the meager pensions on which the elderly subsist in Russia. My photographs of them are a meditation on aging, family and a sense of belonging. The house in which the sisters live was built by their father, the rugs woven by their mother. They contribute to the home as well, with new wallpapers, hand-sewn curtains, quilts and lace. Folded handwritten recipes contain seeds for planting, or rolled up balls of stray hair. Their environment is as much a character as they are themselves."
The collection consists of 39 13"x19" color photographs printed on Epson Exhibition Fiber Paper.
Nadia Sablin, a native of Russia, earned a B.F.A. from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2002 and an M.F.A. from Arizona State University in 2011. A freelance photographer based in Brooklyn, New York, Sablin’s work has been featured in such publications as the New York Times, the Guardian, the Moscow Times, Slate, American Photo, the Calvert Journal, and WPO’s The Magazine. Sablin has received the Firecracker Photographic Grant, a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, a Puffin Foundation Grant, and was named one of the Magenta Foundation’s Emerging Photographers in 2011 as well as Sean O’Hagan’s Juror’s Pick for the Daylight Photo Awards in 2013. Sablin’s photographs have been seen in solo and group exhibitions across the U.S., including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Southeast Museum of Photography, the Cleveland Museum of Art, Blue Sky Gallery in Oregon, and Texas Women’s University School of Art.
About the CDS/ Honickman First Book Prize in Photography: North American photographers who are pursuing work of creative or social importance have too few opportunities for support and recognition; this is especially true when photographers are engaged in personal or in-depth ongoing projects. And while there are other sources for grants and fellowships in photography, the chance to see a body of work in print, as a coherent book-length work, is rare. Concerned about these problems and recognizing their shared organizational interests, the Honickman Foundation and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University came together to create this important biennial book-publication prize, first awarded in 2002.
The prize is open to North American photographers who use their cameras for creative exploration, whether it be of places, people, or communities; of the natural or social world; of beauty at large or the lack of it; of objective or subjective realities. The prize honors work that is visually compelling, that bears witness, and that has integrity of purpose.
Judges for the First Book Prize in Photography are among the most significant and innovative artists, curators, and writers in contemporary photography: Robert Adams, Maria Morris Hambourg, Robert Frank, Mary Ellen Mark, William Eggleston, and Deborah Willis.
Winners of the CDS/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography receive a grant of $3,000, publication of a book of photography, published by Duke University Press and the Center for Documentary Studies, and inclusion in a website devoted to presenting the work of the prizewinners. Winners also receive a solo exhibit—-beginning with the 2014 prize, at Duke University’s new Rubenstein Library Photography Gallery—-after which the photographs are placed in the library’s Archive of Documentary Arts.
Sandra S. Philips selected Nadia Sablin to win the seventh biennial competition in 2014 for her body of photographs that have been published Aunties by Duke University Press and CDS Books of the Center for Documentary Studies.
More information about the CDS/Honickman First Book Prize: http://firstbookprizephoto.com/
