Artist’s Statement:
In this ongoing project, I combine images that I’ve taken of my family over the past eight years to form new narratives about intimacy and silence, youth and aging, unresolved relationships, and love.
Artist’s Bio:
Emily Schiffer is a documentary photographer interested in the intersection between art, audience engagement, and social change.
In 2005, she founded the My Viewpoint Youth Photography Initiative on the Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota, where she continues to teach and shoot. In 2011 she co-created See Potential, a community engagement/ public art project that installs documentary images on abandoned buildings to illustrate economic development initiatives of community leaders on the South Side of Chicago. In 2014 she co-created Danube Revisited: The Inge Morath Truck Project, a photographic road trip and traveling exhibition in which a 2T truck was converted into a mobile gallery and driven it along the length of the Danube River through Central and Eastern Europe.
Awards include: an Audience Engagement Grant from the Open Society Foundation, an Emergency Fund Grant from the Magnum Foundation, the Arnold Newman Prize for New Directions in Portraiture, winner of the PDN Photo Annual Personal Project Category, first prize in the IPA Lucie Awards, the Inge Morath Award, presented by Magnum Photos and the Inge Morath Foundation, and a Fulbright Fellowship in Photography. Emily has exhibited her photographs internationally. Books include: Danube Revisited: The Inge Morath Truck Project (forthcoming), Burn 01, Publications include: Aperture, Smithsonian Magazine, PDN, TIME Magazine Lightbox, and Mother Jones. Her work is in the permanent collections of The Farnsworth Museum, US, The Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts, Japan, Foto Baryo, Philippines, and The Center for Fine Art Photography, US.
Emily holds an MFA from the Stamps School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan and a BA from the University of Pennsylvania.