©Minwoo Lee, Cadastral (Error I), Silver gelatin print, 20 x 20 in.

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 objects of extraordinary beauty and tactility. The award recognizes artists who similarly challenge the limits of the medium through work that uses 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 these five previous recipients, culminating on Friday with the announcement of the 2026 winner.

Today we feature the work of Minwoo Lee, whose practice explores the tension between observation and emotional atmosphere, creating images that feel both intimate and psychologically charged.  Lee’s work was selected by Juror Diane Chung from Chung 24 Gallery in San Francisco who stated, “In consideration of the brief of the award and having listened to one of Paula’s interviews, I feel that Lee’s body of work and practice fully embrace the idea of continued exploration of the medium, the use of historical processes and materials along with how a photograph can exist as a three-dimensional object. He further challenges the perception of photography by brilliantly presenting abstraction of nature beyond the expected.”

Working across portraiture, landscape, and constructed narrative, Lee often photographs transitional spaces and fleeting moments that resist easy explanation. His images are less concerned with straightforward documentation than with evoking sensation, memory, and the instability of perception itself. At its core, Lee’s work examines how photography can hold emotional and psychological states that exist beyond language. His practice reflects a sensitivity to the quiet complexities of contemporary life, where memory remains fluid and unresolved.

©Minwoo Lee, Cadastral (Error II), Silver gelatin print, 20 x 20 in.

Photography has two histories, one of vision and one of the mark. The camera organized sight as something perspectival and measured, a mechanism to contain the world and make it legible. The photographic surface proposed something else, an indexical mark that witnesses its own condition, light fixed on material as both record and residue. My practice begins by questioning that mark, its instability, its capacity to hold meaning in suspension rather than resolve it. Thus, in turn, question the camera and the pictures it engraved in our personal archives.

That inquiry has taken different forms across my work. In Nippon Yusen Kaisha, Shipyard Door, darkroom chemicals were mixed with contaminated shore water at Incheon, the dimension of the work mirroring the width of the cargo bay door through which its historic site witnessed. In Over Exposure, incandescent light is held against the photographic surface, not to illuminate but to burn, to mark duration as damage. In each case the photographic surface becomes a site that is historically embedded, materially unstable, and resistant to the closure that narrative would otherwise impose.

Cadastral (Error) and Parcel, Misfolded, on view at the Center for Photographic Arts, extend this inquiry into the fold as both structure and failure. The works stem from a family photograph of a home built illegally on someone else’s land, a home whose interior still embodies the precarity of being reclaimed, restricted, and ultimately abandoned. The photographic surface carries that condition, chipped emulsion, chemical pooling, the slow deformation of creases and time. To refold the original fold wrongly, against its own crease, into mackerel, perilla leaf, cicada, clock, folding chair, is not to recover the image but to mark the state it is already in. – Minwoo Lee

©Minwoo Lee, Parcel, Misfolded, Series, Silver gelatin print, 8 x 8 in. each

Minwoo Lee is an artist and educator based in Houston, Texas. His work has been exhibited at the Houston Center for Photography, Seoul Museum of Art, De Appel (Amsterdam), Incheon Art Platform, Art Gallery of Guelph, Katzman Contemporary (Toronto), InterAccess (Toronto), and the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, with upcoming exhibitions at the Center for Photographic Art (Carmel), VU Photo (Quebec City), and CICA Museum (Seoul). He has participated in residencies at ARCUS Project, Leighton Artist Residency, Nanji Seoul Museum of Art, Paradise AIR, Incheon Art Platform, and the Banff Centre. Lee is a recipient of grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, and Toronto Arts Council, and is the recipient of the Paula Riff Award from the Center for Photographic Art. He currently serves as Assistant Professor of Photography and Video at the University of Houston.

Instagram: @leealsn

©Minwoo Lee, Carpeted Flight, Silver gelatin print, 152 x 64 in.

©Minwoo Lee, Unfolded Flight, Silver gelatin print, series of 8 x 8 in.

©Minwoo Lee, Over Exposure, Photograph, incandescent light, wood, glass, dimensions variable

©Minwoo Lee, Cross Fire, Two cathode ray televisions, single channel video, feedback loop, infinite duration

©Minwoo Lee, Sisyphus’ Manual, Two channel video, two channel sound, infinite duration

©Minwoo Lee, Moving Spotlight, Two channel projection, two channel sound, infinite duration

©Minwoo Lee, Studio II, Silver gelatin print, 64 x 48 in.

©Minwoo Lee, Surface Ray, Acetate image transfer and fluorescent light, dimensions variable

©Minwoo Lee, Nippon Yusen Kaisha, Shipyard Door, Silver gelatin prints, sea water, dimensions variable

©Minwoo Lee, Missing Portraits, Polaroids, dimensions variable