Film Photo Award - Fall 2021 Student Project Award: Owen McCarter

Film Photo Award – Fall 2021 Student Project Award: Owen McCarter by Eliot DudikNovember 24, 2021

©Owen McCarter, Untitled, 2021

This week, we are thrilled to present the recipients of the Film Photo Award from the Fall 2021 submission period.

The Film Photo Award is open to all emerging, established, and student photographers worldwide. Each award period provides three distinct grants of Kodak Professional Film and complimentary film processing by Griffin Editions to photographers who demonstrate a serious commitment to the field and are motivated to continue the development of still, film-based photography in the 21st century.

Two Visionary Project Awards (100 rolls or 200 sheets of Kodak Professional Film + film processing via Griffin Editions) and one Student Project Award (100 rolls or 200 sheets of Kodak Professional Film + film processing via Griffin Editions + a 4×5 view camera by Standard Cameras) are awarded twice a year, spring and fall.

Stay tuned for the Spring 2022 call for proposals that will open in early 2022. For the latest information, follow Film Photo Award on Instagram: @filmphotoaward

©Owen McCarter, Untitled, 2021

Fall 2021 Student Project Award recipient
Owen McCarter

Owen McCarter (b. 1998.) is a documentary and performance based artist living and working in Western Massachusetts. His current project The Three Eyed Fish centers on the Housatonic River and pollution caused by the General Electric superfund site at the river’s source. Using reenactment, documentary, and constructed narrative imagery the work examines our cognition of place and identity through past, present, and anticipated future experiences. In this manner he explores the effects of intergenerational trauma through both body and landscape memory, questioning what it means to inherit toxicity. In the following year he hopes to experiment with the awarded film as a material object, drawing attention to the negative as a constantly degrading construction of memory. He also intends to work collaboratively with his community to contextualize their relationship to the space they inhabit and increase involvement with remediation of the river through photographic techniques, ecology and local

©Owen McCarter, Untitled, 2021

The photographs presented here represent past work examples from the artist, although they are part of the same project McCarter proposed continuing. We’ll be keeping in touch with McCarter and the other recipients over the coming year, and look forward to an interview and feature of some of the works made with this grant toward the end of 2022.

©Owen McCarter, Untitled, 2021

Owen McCarter (b.1998.) is a documentary and performance based artist living and working in Western Massachusetts. His photographs have been exhibited in The Berkshire Museum, The Norman Rockwell Museum, and galleries across New England. In 2021 he was the recipient of The Norman and Rose Avnet Fellowship Award and T.C. Colley Award for Excellence in Photography. He is currently pursuing a Bachelors of Fine Arts at the Rhode Island School of Design.