The FOCUS Awards at the Griffin Museum

The FOCUS Awards at the Griffin Museum to Be Hosted May 10th, 2007 in Winchester, MA

article by Frank Lovece

On May 10th, 2007, The Griffin Museum in Winchester, MA will hold the 2nd Annual Focus Awards, to honor those who have been instrumental in building greater awareness of the photographic arts in the general public.

The Griffin Museum is the wonderful classroom venue for the Digital Photo Academy's Boston workshops. The museum is a center for photography in the region, and exhibitions have featured the work of such photographic luminaries as Edward Weston, Sebastiao Salgado and Edward Curtis, as well as contemporary iconoclast Jan Staller and celebrity photographer Peggy Sirota.

Photographers have their awards – the Inifinities, the Ansel Adams, the Prix Nadar and of course the Pulitzer, among others. Not so much so people in photography-related fields. That's one reason the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, Mass., outside Boston, is having its Focus Awards gala on Thursday, May 10, 2007, to honor the likes of curators, photo editors, organization heads and others who help give photographers a forum. That, and, hey, who doesn't like to get and give awards? Most of you outside Boston probably hadn't heard of the Griffin before this.

There's no reason not to have, of course. Founded as the Arthur Griffin Community Center in 1992, and formally becoming a museum after executive director Blake Fitch took her post 10 years later, the acclaimed space showcases the medium's range from photojournalism to fine-art surrealism. Traditionalists and historians can find Edward Weston. People who need People can find celebrity photographer Peggy Sirota.

Ironically, its late founder, Arthur Griffin (1903-2001), specialized in one thing -- though the damn Yankee specialized in it damn well. A Lawrence, Mass., native known as "New England's Photographer Laureate" to such friends as author John Updike, Griffin was a renowned photojournalist for the likes of The Saturday Evening Post and Life. He shot every major Franklin from Roosevelt to Sinatra, and landmarks from the Taj Mahal to Ted Williams – snapping the first color photo of that baseball legend in 1939, The Kid's debut season in the majors. One of the museum's three galleries is devoted to Griffin's work.

SportsIllustrated July15 2002 ted williams arthur griffin

Cover, Sports Illustrated July 15, 2002, featuring image of Ted Williams taken by Arthur Griffin

The Focus Awards premiered in 2006, giving its initial Lifetime Achievement prize to Anne Wilkes Tucker, the longtime curator of photography at Houston's Museum of Fine Arts. The Rising Star award went to Brian Paul Clamp, owner of the Manhattan gallery ClampArt. Barbara Hitchcock, curator of the Waltham, Mass.-based Polaroid Corporation's world-renown Polaroid Collection, and author of The Polaroid Book (Taschen, 2005), won the New England Beacon award, which recognizes a local individual whose work brings prominence to the area's photographic legacy.

This year there are four honors, with the addition of the Spotlight Award, given to a person, company or other entity "that consistently shines a light on photography and has created far-reaching impact in the field" – sort of a quarter- or-maybe half-a-lifetime award.

"There are so many awards that recognize all the wonderful work photographers do," says Fitch, a photographer herself who has had gallery shows in places as diverse as Texas and Syria, "but sitting on both sides of the table as the director of a museum and working as a photographer I understand how important the work done by curators and gallery owners and educators and all those people are in helping photographers build their careers. They're the ones who help photographers realize their strengths and weaknesses, and help you develop their work, and we felt they were underrecognized."

This year's awards and their recipients are:

● Lifetime Achievement – Kathy Ryan, photo editor of The New York Times Magazine

● Rising Star – Sara Terry, founder and board president of The Aftermath Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping photojournalists document the aftermath of war and other conflicts

● New England Beacon– Clifford Ackley, curator of prints, drawings and photographs at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

● Spotlight – Photo District News magazine, the more than 20-year-old Manhattan-based trade publication with related photography education and exposition divisions, all now part of Nielsen Business Media.

Much has been written about the esteemed Ackley and Ryan, the latter of whom garnered unwelcome press last year after a Times Magazine cover image of former U.S. senator Mark Warner, a presidential hopeful, had odd colors that didn't reflect his real clothing, and distorted his facial features. Ryan on NPR blamed the use of an unusual film stock, and the Times ran a correction stating that the film "can cause colors to shift, and the processing altered them further; the change escaped notice because of a misunderstanding by the editors." NPR was dubious, and others wondered why the Times was even using film at all. Regardless, the magazine, since Ryan's tenure began in 1985, has won awards from the Pictures of the Year competition, World Press Photo, the Society of Publication Designers and the Overseas Press Club, while Ryan herself has won the Canon Picture Editor of the Year Award and was named Picture Editor of the Year by the Lucie Awards in 2003.

kathy ryan focus awards portrait robert maxwell
Kathy Ryan © Robert Maxwell

Ackley, the 69-year-old solon of Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, has been a curator there since 1966, basically bringing its photo collection from the basement to the spotlight. "They hired me to work on Old Master prints and didn't know I was bringing with me an interest in modern art, contemporary art and photography," Ackley says today. The collection began in 1924 with a gift from the legendary photographer Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946). "For an art museum, we were quite early in 1924 accepting photographs as part of the art collection," Ackley says. "His gift was supplemented by his widow, [artist] Georgia O'Keefe in 1950." Photography wasn't even an official part of the museum until 1978, when the name of Ackley's department became Prints, Drawings and Photographs, and no formal photography curator was appointed until 2000. Thanks to Ackley, the museum was already a major photographic showcase by then. "I didn't realize what I'd done until a few years ago when we did a show surveying the [photo] collection," Ackley says, "and I realized that the majority of the pictures on the wall were ones that I'd recommended."

cliff ackley focus awards griffin museum portrait
Cliff Ackley

Relative newcomer Sara Terry is an apt choice for Rising Star. Her organization The Aftermath Project came out of Terry’s five-year-long, self-assigned work that became the book "Aftermath: Bosnia's Long Road to Peace" (Channel Photographics, 2005), which chronicles the day-to-day struggle for life to continue in the compound-name country of Bosnia and Herzegovina following a devastating, ethnic-based 1992-95 war. As Publisher's Weekly wrote of it, "One quietly devastating image shows a forensic anthropologist collapsed into a chair in 2000, exhausted from cleaning the corpse of someone who was 'ethnically cleansed' in 1992. … Terry's book reaffirms photography's crucial role as witness and spur to conscience."

sara terry focus awards rising star the aftermath project
Sara Terry

"I was a writer for many years and became a photographer about eight years ago," says Terry, who heads The Aftermath Project with an executive director, Kirsten Rian. "I spent four years doing the book then had a one-year fellowship. I just feel deeply that war is only half the story," she says. "After all the tanks and armaments go away, how does ordinary life simply pick up again?"

Through her camera lens, she watched it happen, slowly, over years, and it changed her. She wanted to alert the world and "make big, big structural changes. But how? I'm not sure why I thought I could do something, but I started a grant program" at www.theaftermathproject.org. "It was an organic, step-by-step thing" that's currently raising money for an endowment through auctions of donated photographic work. "Last year we had more than a hundred photographers contributing," she says proudly. The Aftermath Project has since partnered with the Aperture Foundation and the Danish publishing company Mets & Schilt to publish a book of the winners of the Aftermath photo competition; titled War Is Only Half the Story and scheduled for release in spring 2008, it's the first of what Terry hopes will became an annual release.

"This award really belongs to two women, me and Kirsten, since we were total partners in putting this together," Terry says. "Neither one of us has taken a penny from Aftermath. I still make my living as a photographer -- I shoot for humanitarian organizations, I shoot maybe 10 documentary-style weddings a year, and I guest-host an NPR program."

This year's award presenters are the photographer and Yale faculty member Gregory Crewdson; the photographer and Rhode Island School of Design faculty member Henry Horenstein; Susan Paine, chair of the Board of Trustees of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and Sherman Teichman, director of the Institute for Global Leadership at Tufts University. Last year's were the photographer David Levinthal; the actor, author, director and photographer Leonard Nimoy; and Bill Hunt of New York City's Hasted Hunt Gallery.

focus awards 2006 presenters bill hunt leonard nimoy david levinthal
2006 Focus Awards Presenters and Organizers (L to R): Bill Hunt, David Levinthal, Blake Fitch, Anne Wilkes Tucker, Barbara HItchcock, Brian Clamp

"Last year, on the night of the awards," remembers Fitch, "I stood up to welcome everyone, and I looked around the room and saw a couple of my mentors there -- people I've admired for years. And they believe in our museum and in the awards and what we're about, and the room was filled -- they'd come all the way from New York and L.A. and Houston to this little suburb of Boston, and I paused and it almost brought me to tears that we made this happen. I thought, 'God, how on Earth are we gonna do this next year?'"

Next year is here. While the awards' regionalism is still hard to miss, the recipients' works transcend boundaries, providing spaces, resources, and just simply the needed attention for photographers documenting the world from, literally, Boston to Bosnia.

The Focus Awards will be presented at an evening reception at the Griffin Museum, 67 Shore Road, Winchester, MA 01890, on May 10, 2007, beginning at 7:00 p.m. Tickets for the evening are $45 and may be purchased by calling the Griffin at 781-729-1158.