The First Photographer To Win The Hugo Boss Prize

The Hugo Boss Prize is one of the top art awards in the world. The award is given to one artist every other year. New-York based photographer Deana Lawson has won the prestigious prize, and is the first photographer to do so. Besides the trophy, Lawson will have an exhibition at Guggenheim Museum in New York in spring 2021 and take home a $100.000 cash prize, as Art News details:

Lawson’s photography centers Black men and women, and features them in poses and settings that appear to be highly naturalistic, but are in fact carefully staged in advance. They tend to feature individuals who appear to be families and couples, and they allude to histories of disaporas and racism in the process. “Photography,” Lawson once said, “has the power to make history and the present moment speak towards each other.”

It is a body of work that, because of its rigorous conceptual framework, has been hard to define. But, in its reworking of art-historical tropes and its emphasis on tenderness and intimacy, her photography’s aesthetic has proven influential. Zadie Smith once wrote of Lawson’s photography, “Black people are not conceived as victims, social problems, or exotics but, rather, as what Lawson calls ‘creative, godlike beings’ who do not ‘know how miraculous we are.’”