The 2022 Paula Riff Award Winner: Aimée Beaubien

The 2022 Paula Riff Award Winner: Aimée Beaubien by Aline SmithsonJune 29, 2026

©Aimée Beaubien, For you from me

In early February 2021, we lost a bright light and singular artist, the incomparable Paula Riff. She left behind her daughter, along with an expansive community of friends, artists, and admirers, all grappling with the profound absence of her presence and vision. In honor of Paula, Lenscratch and the Center of Photographic Art established The Paula Riff Award in 2021 as a way to celebrate and extend her enduring legacy. Paula was an innovator who pushed photography beyond its conventional boundaries, using cameraless techniques and historical processes to create luminous objects of extraordinary beauty and tactility. The award recognizes artists who similarly challenge the limits of the medium through work that foregrounds the artist’s hand—whether through alternative photographic processes, cutting, sewing, weaving, sculptural intervention, or other acts of material transformation.

The Center of Photographic Art has just opened the exhibition, Changing the Narrative
The First 5 Years of Paula Riff Award Winners, featuring work by Aimee Beaubien, Minwoo Lee, Paula McCartney, Marni Myers, and Katie Shapiro. The exhibition will be on view through July 26th, 2026.

This week, we revisit the work of the award’s five previous recipients, culminating on Friday with the announcement of the 2026 winner. Today we feature the work of Aimée Beaubien, whose inventive and deeply tactile practice continues to expand the possibilities of photographic installation. I had the pleasure of jurying the Paula Riff Award in 2022, and Beaubien’s work immediately distinguished itself through its fearless experimentation and intelligence. Combining photography, sculpture, collage, and architectural intervention, she reimagines the photograph not as a fixed image, but as something spatial and alive. Her installations invite viewers to physically navigate images as environments. With Beaubien’s unique perspective, photography becomes both object and experience as she creates playful and immersive photographic worlds.

©Aimée Beaubien, Making Meaning (detail)

Since receiving the Paula Riff Award, I have returned to a way of working I first developed during the culture wars of the 1990s to create ‘Future Reverse: the body of the text’, a new series of photographic installations. This summer, elements will be shown for the first time in “Changing the Narrative: The First 5 Years of Paula Riff Award Winners” at the Center for Photographic Art.

In this work, the body is both message and material. I write fragments of inner monologue, political slogans, whispers, and half-remembered phrases directly onto my skin, then photograph my hands, arms, and fists at life-size and larger-than-life scale – gestures that twist, press, and insist in space.

Printed on outdoor banner material drawn from advertising and protest, these images are suspended with survival paracord, forming environments to move through. Language becomes physical and unstable – spoken, printed, embodied, overheard, carried. Writing on my skin collapses private thought and public speech, poetry and propaganda, vulnerability and spectacle.

In stark black and white, I draw on the urgency and fleeting authority of newsprint. Each cut fragment hangs independently, forming shifting constellations – a forest of signs.

Amid weaponized language, legislated bodies, and pervasive misinformation, I return to the body as a charged site of presence, resistance, and shared vulnerability. – Aimée Beaubien

©Aimée Beaubien, What Now

Aimée Beaubien reorganizes photographic experience while exploring networks of meaning and association between the real and the ideal through immersive installations, collages, and artists’ books. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at SF Camerawork (San Francisco, CA); the Art Institute of Chicago (IL); the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago, IL); the Newport Art Museum (RI); the Houston Center for Photography (TX); the UCR Museum of Photography (Riverside, CA); Gallery UNO Projektraum (Berlin, Germany); and Virus Art Gallery (Rome, Italy). Beaubien is Professor of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she has taught since 1997.

Instagram: @aimeebeaubien