About Take the Picture: Capture, Collect, Archive, Photograph

Do we make photographs, or take them? Since its inception, photography has been envisioned as a collecting tool: a means of accumulating, preserving, and organizing things in the world through the creation of surrogate visual records. The camera imperfectly gathers and groups in order to memorialize, to document, to make meaning, and even to possess. The curator is calling for work that explores the potential and the limitations of photography as an acquisitive practice and asks how photographs might allow us to collect the uncollectible. Selected photographs will be included in the publication, Take the Picture: Capture, Collect, Archive, Photograph.

What winners receive

Selected artists will be included in a special publication, Take the Picture: Capture, Collect, Archive, Photograph, to be launched in September 2018. These artists will receive a copy of the publication in which their work is shown. Additionally, all applications will be considered for DCCP’s forthcoming exhibition at Darkroom Detroit in 2019.

About Detroit Center for Contemporary Photography

The Detroit Center for Contemporary Photography (DCCP) is a non-profit organization that brings together a community of people interested in photography and lens-based media. Its mission is to foster the appreciation and understanding of photography by promoting contemporary lens-based artists. DCCP works to encourage creative discourse and a visual understanding of the still and moving frame by offering online and pop-up exhibitions, print publications, and portfolio reviews. DCCP seeks to broaden its outreach among Detroit’s diverse communities through exhibitions and programming in collaboration with local institutions.

In its efforts to provide innovative means of representing contemporary and unique work DCCP has moved its galleries online. The Collection, New Directions, and Frame/s are continually updated and aim to highlight the work of emerging lens-based artists. By embracing developments in digital media DCCP will continue to function as a vital cultural resource that extends beyond Detroit’s city limit.

Juror Information

Andrew Kensett
Assistant Curator at the Center for Creative Photography
Andrew Kensett is currently assistant curator at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where he has organized exhibitions for the John and Doris Norton Gallery for the Center for Creative Photography at Phoenix Art Museum. After graduating with a BFA in Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design, Kensett joined the staffs of both the Center for Creative Photography and Phoenix Art Museum in 2015. He co-organized the astrophotography exhibition Astronomical: Photographs of Our Solar System and Beyond at the Center. In summer of 2017, Kensett opened Longer Ways to Go: Photographs of the American Road at Phoenix Art Museum. The exhibition presents a selection of photographs made on Historic Route 66 by Japanese photographer Kōzō Miyoshi alongside photographs from the Center’s collection made of and on the road. Most recently, Kensett curated The Logic of the Copy: Four Decades of Photography in Print, on view through mid-April at Phoenix Art Museum. The exhibition, drawn from the collections of the Center for Creative Photography and Phoenix Art Museum, explores the intersections of photography and printmaking in the latter half of the twentieth century. Kensett is currently working on an installation of Longer Ways to Go that will go on view at the Center for Creative Photography this summer. His writing has appeared on Lensculture and Don’t Take Pictures.