Donna Gordon: 2025 Denis Roussel Award Winner

Donna Gordon: 2025 Denis Roussel Award Winner by Aline SmithsonMay 16, 2026

©Donna Gordon, Vanessa, Embrace

Interdisciplinary artist and writerDonna Gordon was awarded the 2025 Denis Roussel Award through Rfotofolio. Her submission featured a series of exquisite photogravure portraits of women situated within the natural world, evoking contemporary visions of Eve in the Garden of Eden. Juror Christopher James praised the work, writing, “This body of work is grounded in myth and meaning and is a satisfying experience for me as a visitor to the work.”

The Rfotofolio Denis Roussel Award is an annual international photography award established in 2018 to honor the legacy of photographer, educator, and alternative process pioneer Denis Roussel. Organized through Rfotofolio, the award celebrates photographers working with historical and alternative photographic processes, including silver gelatin, cyanotype, collodion, lumen prints, and other handmade techniques. More than simply a grant program, the Denis Roussel Award reflects the spirit of Roussel himself—an artist remembered for his generosity, curiosity, and belief that beauty could be found everywhere, even in the most ordinary subjects. The award was created to continue his legacy of experimentation, craftsmanship, and mentorship within the photographic community.

Each year, photographers from around the world submit portfolios of seven images accompanied by an artist statement describing both the work and the process behind it. The award is juried by prominent figures in the field of photography and alternative processes, including artist and educator Christopher James, whose long-standing involvement has helped shape the award’s reputation within the photographic community. At its core, the Denis Roussel Award champions slow, tactile, process-driven photography in an increasingly digital age, supporting artists whose practices emphasize experimentation, materiality, and the handmade photographic object.

Today we share an interview with the artist and the founders of Rfotofolio. Rfotofolio is an independent online photography platform and community dedicated to supporting contemporary lens-based artists through exhibitions, interviews, portfolio features, education, and artist opportunities.

©Donna Gordon, Among the Roses

Donna Gordon is a Cambridge, MA based figurative and portrait artist — embracing photography, photo transfer, and photogravure — in different ways and at different times — to investigate, deconstruct, and rebuild the human form.

She is currently a Scholar in the Brandeis University Women’s Studies Research Center through December 2027.

Her photogravures were included in 2026 “Currents,” Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, and she received the 2025 Denis Roussel Award from Rfotofolio for a series of photogravures. She was a 2024 MacDowell Fellow, and received the 2024 LensCulture Jurors’ Choice Award. She was awarded the 2024 and 2023 Julia Margaret Cameron Award for a portrait series, with work exhibited at FotoNostrum Gallery, Barcelona.

Her work has been featured in Shots Magazine, Lenscratch, Dodho, The Hand, and Art.Doc. Prints, photographs, and drawings have been shown in both solo and group shows at the Danforth Art Museum, Griffin Museum, Soho Photo Gallery, Bromfield Gallery, Fitchburg Art Museum, Cape Cod Museum and others. Her work is in several private collections.

She’s represented by Bromfield Gallery, Boston.

Her work with former political prisoners in collaboration with Amnesty International culminated in “Putting Faces on the Unimaginable: Portraits and Interviews with Former Prisoners of Conscience,” exhibited at Harvard’s Fogg Museum.

Donna is also a fiction writer. Her debut novel, What Ben Franklin Would Have Told

Me, (Regal House 2022) was named by Kirkus Review among the top 100 Indie novels of 2023.

Instagram: @donnagordon8994

©Donna Gordon, Two Female Figures

Would you please tell us about yourself?

I’m a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based photographer and printmaker focused on portrait and figurative subjects. I’m also a fiction writer, and published my first novel, What Ben Franklin Would Have Told Me, (Regal House) in 2022. As a child, there was nothing better than a sharpened pencil and a piece of newsprint. That tactile quality of making marks on paper whether in photographs, photogravures, or alternative processes–are all an attempt to connect the created object with the human hand.

Where did you get your photographic training?

I don’t have a degree in photography, but have taken workshops to learn how to work with historic and alternative processes. I graduated from Brown as a creative writing major and then went to Stanford as a Wallace Stegner Fellow. I was writing poetry and fiction. And thinking visually. I got my first camera when I was about 30. It was an Olympus OM 1. I worked at a private high school outside of Boston and was asked to photograph the kids at their plays and musicals. The school paid for the camera and a darkroom class at nearby DeCordova Museum. My first self-initiated documentary project was with Amnesty International. I interviewed and photographed fifteen people from all over the world who had been political prisoners and who were on Amnesty’s speakers’ list. “Putting Faces on the Unimaginable,” portraits with captions was shown at Harvard’s Fogg Museum.

©Donna Gordon, Cece Blooming

Please tell us about the work you submitted to Denis Roussel Award.

The seven photogravures are all part of “In the Garden,” begun as a series of photographs of contemporary women—including trans, lesbian, and others-meant to refute the stereotype of Eve in the Garden of Eden. As much as it’s a political statement, it’s really about individuals. I’m fascinated by each of the faces and the stories behind them.

©Donna Gordon, Jo’s House

Please tell us about an image (not your own) that has stayed with you over time.

Käthe Kollwitz’s self- portrait, 1934, crayon and brush lithograph. Several of her self-portraits stay with me, but this is one I first saw when I was a teenager and have never forgotten the intensity and the ways in which I perceived her eyes made contact with mine. I love the gritty quality of her work, whether print, drawing, or sculpture.

What image of yours would you say taught you an important lesson?

Last winter, I took some leaps of faith with a very large composition that combined photo transfer and solar plate etching. The piece is maybe 54 inches long and 40 inches high and printed on Kitakata. I hadn’t pre-planned the combination and was moving things around on the glass counter top in the printmaking studio. Eventually, the composition quietly built itself because I trusted the fact that I didn’t know where it was going. I kept moving shapes around until it felt right. Meaning is sometimes like that—recognizable after the fact.

©Donna Gordon, Kendra, Near Mt. Monadnock, Peterborough, NH.

Who has had an influence on your creative process?

Photographers Graciela Iturbide, Lee Miller, Duane Michaels. Printmakers Kathe Kollwitz, Goya, Blake, Rauschenberg, Michael Mazur. And so many others. A portrait is a story of human character interpreted through light and shadow. It has as much to do with emotion as it does with geometry. It’s a kind of intentional coincidence—a coming together of what’s seen and unknown—and the tension between the two.

Before learning to create photogravures, I made a large series of paper lithographs, “Double Vision,” for which I transferred my photographs onto pronto plates and used liquid gum Arabic and water to make the transfer onto BFK Rives. Around that time, I took a workshop at Maine Media and learned about Ink Aid products—their transfer film and Transferiez medium. Last summer I went to Cone Editions in Vermont and learned to use Green Mountain plates to make photogravures.

©Donna Gordon, After Vermeer

What part of image-making do you find the most rewarding?

Choosing a powerful image to work with. Then setting up technical specifications properly so that an intuitive flow can happen once work has

started. Getting the tools right, ink and paper. Setting the pressure on the press. It’s often a wordless beginning, seemingly without strategy, but the choices and intent make themselves known during the process. Printing the best image can take some time through trial and error of inking and wiping. Deciding when the plate is ready to print, trusting the moment.

©Donna Gordon, Self-portrait with vines

How do you work through times when nothing seems to work?

For technical problems, I retrace my steps and check to make sure I’ve prepared my materials correctly. Things can go wrong if there’s a wrinkle in a sheet of newsprint or a snag in a roller or brayer, or if timing is off if I’m working on a photo transfer or photogravure. In terms of the image itself, sometimes it’s hard to evaluate. A piece of something might be working, or it may lead to rethinking about the way things fit or don’t fit together. Stepping back is always a good idea.

What tools have you found essential in the making of your work?

I rent studio time at Mixit Printmaking Studio in Somerville, Massachusetts. I use the French Tool Press and Green Mountain plates developed by Jon and Cathy Cone of Cone Editions in Vermont. These photopolymer plates are easy to work with. I like Hahnemühle Copper Plate for printing. For photo transfer and monotype, I like to use a roll of Agawami Kitakata and cut things to size for large pieces.

Is there something in photography that you would like to try in the future?

I’d like to make a large photogravure plate with several figures that would look like a sort of Roman frieze. It’s something I’ve tried drawing.

How does your art affect the way you see the world?

I’m a very visual person and am often distracted by what I see. I’ve become a bit shameless when I see someone whose look is incredibly interesting and I want to try to capture that with the camera. I sometimes feel greedy and extroverted when I ask if I can photograph them, when I’m really not like that most of the time.

What’s on the horizon?

My goal is to create a book of photogravures from “In the Garden.” So far, I’ve photographed about 35 individuals and I’m hoping to increase the range and diversity before sitting down to curate. I’m looking for a publisher.