International Center Of Photography To Honor Shahidul Alam, Zadie Smith, Rosalind Fox Solomon, Dawoud Bey, And Jess T. Dugan At 2019 Infinity Awards

NEW YORK, Feb. 7, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The International Center of Photography (ICP), the world's leading institution dedicated to photography and visual culture, today announced the 2019 honorees of its annual Infinity Awards, the leading honor for excellence in the field. The 35th annual ICP Infinity Awards will be held on the evening of Tuesday, April 2 at Ziegfeld Ballroom (141 West 54^th Street, New York City). The event is ICP's largest fundraiser and benefits its education and exhibition programs.

"At ICP's annual Infinity Awards, we honor the significant talents of those using photography, writing, and visual arts to make an impact," says Mark Lubell, executive director of ICP. "As the news cycle continues to churn, and journalists remain under attack, this is the perfect moment to celebrate those who bravely harness the power of images to help inform our understanding of the world."

2019 INFINITY AWARD CATEGORY AND RECIPIENTS: 
Juried Awards:

• Art: Dawoud Bey
• Critical Writing and Research: Zadie Smith, "Deana Lawson's Kingdom of Restored Glory" for the New Yorker
• Emerging Photographer: Jess T. Dugan

Non-Juried Awards:

• Lifetime Achievement: Rosalind Fox Solomon
• Special Presentation: Shahidul Alam

The 2019 Infinity Award honorees in the Art, Critical Writing and Research, and Emerging Photographer categories were chosen by a selection committee composed of Erin Barnett, director of exhibitions and collections, ICP; David Gonzalez, co-editor, Lens, the New York Times; Kristen Joy Watts, editor, @design, Instagram; and Rhea L. Combs, supervisory museum curator, Department of Film & Photography, Earl W. and Amanda Stafford Center for African American Media Arts, Smithsonian, National Museum of African American History and Culture.

The non-juried Infinity Awards were selected by ICP to acknowledge major achievements in photography, and to honor Cornell Capa, who founded ICP in 1974 to preserve the legacy of "concerned photography"—the creation of socially and politically minded images that have the potential to educate and change the world.

Since 1985, the Infinity Awards have recognized significant contributions and emerging talent in a wide range of fields that now encompass photojournalism, art, fashion photography, publishing, critical writing, and new media. Past recipients include Berenice Abbott; Lynsey Addario; Richard Avedon; Ariella Azoulay; David Bailey; Alexandra Bell; Harry Benson; Maurice Berger; Amber Bracken; Henri Cartier-Bresson; Sophie Calle; Edmund Clark; Bruce Davidson; Roy DeCarava; Elliott Erwitt; Sir Harold Evans; Larry Fink; For Freedoms; Samuel Fosso; Robert Frank; LaToya Ruby Frazier; Adam Fuss; David Goldblatt; Paul Graham; David Guttenfelder; Mishka Henner; André Kertész; Natalie Keyssar; Steven Klein; William Klein; Karl Lagerfeld; Annie Leibovitz; Helen Levitt; Mary Ellen Mark; Ryan McGinley; Susan Meiselas; Duane Michals; Daidō Moriyama; Zanele Muholi; Shirin Neshat; Gordon Parks; Gilles Peress; Walid Raad; Eugene Richards; Sebastião Salgado; Malick Sidibé; Lorna Simpson; Cindy Sherman; Dayanita Singh; Juergen Teller; Peter Van Atgmael; and Ai Weiwei, among others.

Co-Chairs of this year's Infinity Awards are Marjorie Rosen, Michael A. Clinton, and Judith Bookbinder. The event's Honorary Committee members include Lynsey Addario; Sade Baderinwa; Glenda Bailey; Alexandra Bell; Maurice Berger; Nancy Borowick; Kimberly Drew; Sir Harold Evans; Samuel Fosso; Adam Fuss; Nina Garcia; Lauren Greenfield; Natalie Keyssar; Julianna Margulies and Keith Lieberthal; Kurt Markus; Mary McCartney; Jean Pigozzi; Pat Schoenfeld; Mark Seliger; Stephen Wilkes; Daniella Zalcman; and Alice Zimet. And, the 2019 Infinity Awards Benefit Committee is composed of Peggy and Keith Anderson; Bonnie and James D'Aquila; Delancey Street Associates; Dow Jones; Englander Family; Gensler; Renee Harbers Liddell and Chris Liddell; HEARST; the Rita and Alex Hillman Foundation; Bob Jeffrey; the Kaneff Foundation; Bicky and George Kellner; Almudena and Pablo Legorreta; Dominique and Samuel L. Milbank; Sylvia and Jan W. Mulder; Gwen and Peter Norton; Fabian Onetti; Lori and Janusz A. Ordover; Marjorie and Jeffrey A. Rosen; Stephanie and Fred Shuman; Bruce Silverstein; Stefano Tonchi; Diane and Tom Tuft; and Heather and Bill Vrattos.

Sponsored by Hearst and Harbers Studios, the 35th annual ICP Infinity Awards will draw more than 400 attendees from the worlds of art, business, entertainment, fashion, philanthropy, and photography. Past Infinity Award attendees include Hayley Baldwin Bieber; Hamish Bowles; Naomi Campbell; Grace Coddington; Ashley Graham; Bella Hadid; Carolina Herrera; Arianna Huffington; Tommy Lee Jones; Karlie Kloss; Dan Rather; Alexandra Richards; Leelee Sobieski; Ben Stiller; Christine Taylor; Anna Wintour; and Jason Wu. 

For more information or to purchase tickets, please contact [email protected] or 212.857.9714. 

ABOUT THE 2019 INFINITY AWARD HONOREES 
Time magazine's "2018 Person of the Year," photographer, writer, and human rights activist Shahidul Alam, obtained a PhD in chemistry from London University before taking up photography. Returning to his native Bangladesh in 1984, he campaigned to bring down autocratic general Hussain Muhammad Ershad. In his pursuit of social justice, he set up the award-winning Drik Picture Library, Pathshala South Asian Media Institute, and Chobi Mela international photography festival. His book My Journey as a Witness has been described by John Morris, the legendary picture editor of Life, as the "most important book ever written by a photographer." A recognized public speaker, Alam has lectured at Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Stanford, and Yale universities. He has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern, and Centre Georges Pompidou. His awards include a Lucie Award, as well as the Shilpakala Award, the highest cultural award given to Bangladeshi artists. Alam is the only person of color to have chaired the prestigious international jury of World Press Photo. He is a visiting professor of Sunderland University and an honorary fellow of the Royal Photographic Society. In 2018, he was jailed and tortured for speaking out against his government's repressive practices.

Dawoud Bey began his career as an artist in 1975 with a series of photographs, Harlem, USA, that were later exhibited in his first one-person exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979. He has since had numerous exhibitions worldwide, at such institutions as the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, the High Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and other museums worldwide. His works are included in the permanent collections of over 50 museums throughout the United States and Europe. In 2020, his work will be the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. He is a recipient of a 2017 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur "genius grant"; a United States Artists fellow; and the recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Lucie Foundation, among other honors. Bey holds a master of fine arts degree from Yale University School of Art and is currently Professor of Art and a former Distinguished College Artist at Columbia College Chicago, where he has taught since 1998. 

Jess T. Dugan is an artist whose work explores issues of identity, gender, sexuality, and community through photographic portraiture. She holds a BFA in photography from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, a master of liberal arts in museum studies from Harvard University, and an MFA in photography from Columbia College Chicago. Her work has been widely exhibited at venues including the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the San Diego Museum of Art; the Aperture Foundation, New York; the Transformer Station, Cleveland; and the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago. Dugan's books include Every Breath We Drew (Daylight Books, 2015) and To Survive on This Shore: Photographs and Interviews with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Older Adults (Kehrer Verlag, 2018). She is the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and was selected by the White House as a Champion of Change. She is represented by the Catherine Edelman Gallery in Chicago, IL.

Rosalind Fox Solomon travels the world to find her subjects. She enters closed circles and takes risks in terms of personal experience and artistic practice. Her unflinching gaze at human vulnerability provokes strong emotions. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and grants from the American Institute of Indian Studies from 1981 to 1984. Fox Solomon has had residencies at the Banff Center, Blue Mountain Center, the MacDowell Colony, and the Corporation of Yaddo. Bruce Silverstein represents Fox Solomon in New York, where she has had four solo gallery exhibitions. Her work is in the collections of more than 50 museums around the world, including the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris; George Eastman House, Rochester; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museo de Arte de Lima; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington; National Gallery of Canada, Ontario; Photographische Sammlung, Cologne; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. In 1988, the Grey Gallery of Art at NYU mounted the 65-print exhibition Portraits in the Time of AIDS, selections of which were exhibited in 2015 at Paris Photo in the Salon d'Honneur. Books of her photographs include Chapalingas (Steidl 2003), Polish Shadow (Steidl 2006) THEM (Mack 2014), Got to Go (Mack 2016), and Liberty Theater (Mack 2018). Fox Solomon lives and works in New York.

Zadie Smith's first novel, White Teeth, was the winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award, the Guardian First Book Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, and the Commonwealth Writers' First Book Award. Her second, The Autograph Man, won the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize. Smith's third novel, On Beauty, won the Orange Prize for Fiction, a Commonwealth Writers' Best Book Award, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Her fourth novel, NW, was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Women's Prize for Fiction. Her most recent novel, Swing Time, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and longlisted for the Man Booker 2017. Her first essay collection, Changing My Mind, was published in 2009 and her second, Feel Free, in 2018. Smith is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has twice been listed as one of Granta's 20 Best Young British Novelists. She writes regularly for the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books and is a tenured professor of creative writing at New York University.

ABOUT ICP 
The International Center of Photography (ICP) is the world's leading institution dedicated to photography and visual culture. Founded by Cornell Capa in 1974 to preserve the legacy of "concerned photography"—in which the reproduced image is both a catalyst for and a record of social change—ICP's mission endures even as the medium and practices of socially engaged imagemaking have changed. Through its museum, located at 250 Bowery, as well as exhibitions, school, public programs, and community outreach, ICP offers an open forum for dialogue about the role images play in our culture. Since its founding, more than 700 exhibitions and thousands of classes have been presented, providing instruction at every level. ICP brings together photographers and artists, students, and scholars to create and interpret the world of the image, exploring photography and visual culture as mediums of empowerment and as catalysts for wide-reaching social change. Learn more at icp.org. 

SOURCE International Center of Photography

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