The 2025 Paula Riff Award Winner: Marni Meyers

The 2025 Paula Riff Award Winner: Marni Meyers by Aline SmithsonJuly 2, 2026

©Marni Meyers, 6 Across 8 Down

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 2021, in honor of Paula, Lenscratch and the Center of Photographic Art established The Paula Riff Award 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 these five previous recipients, culminating on Friday with the announcement of the 2026 winner.

Today we feature the work of Marni Meyers. In 2025, Juror Paula Tognarelli selected the work of this artist, “I present to you the work of Marni Myers whose work for me echoed the language of the call for entry for the Paula Riff Award. Myers is an alternative process artist. Like Paula, Myers experiments, sorts, and cuts. She also repurposes cyanotype output, which adds a layer of unplanned uncertainty to all of her art work endeavors. I felt that of all the submissions, Marni checked all the boxes for the requirements of the call for entry for this very prestigious award.”

©Marni Meyers

Design and photography are two essential forces in my creative process–each one feeds and challenges the other. I’ve always been attuned to the spaces around me, a sensitivity that was nurtured growing up in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. The city’s urban grid left a lasting impression on me, and I often find myself fascinated how structure and pattern coexist in our environment.

With a foundation in graphic design, my photography delves into my evolving relationship with pattern, texture, and minimalism. I’m drawn to the subtle beauty of the world around me, capturing moments that provoke curiosity. I want my images to leave the viewer wondering, to spark questions about the subject matter and how it resonates with them. In this way, I hope my work becomes a springboard for dialogue, encouraging a deeper engagement with what might otherwise be overlooked.

My current work with alternative processes is an exploration of layering, both literal and conceptual. I’ve taken a more tactile, hands-on approach to my prints, moving away from direct botanical representation. Instead, I lean into a softer, more painterly aesthetic, where abstraction and mystery take center stage. The result is work that is less about depicting the tangible and more about embracing the intangible, inviting viewers into a space of quiet discovery. – Marni Meyers

The Artist Marni Meyers

©Marni Meyers, Botanical Blocks

Marni Myers is an interdisciplinary artist and visual alchemist, exploring dream-like states through minimal, imperfect layers. Through the alternative photographic process of cyanotype printing, she uncovers quiet discoveries within the photographic image, revealing her hand with tactile compositions, painterly textures, soft tonal shifts, and edges that resist perfection.

Myers is the recipient of the 2025 Paula Riff Award, presented by the Center for Photographic Art and Lenscratch, honoring innovation in photographic alternative processes. Her work has been featured in national solo and group exhibitions at venues including The Photographer’s Eye Collective + Gallery (Escondido, CA), LightBox Photographic Gallery (Astoria, OR), PhotoPlace (Middlebury, VT), Center for Photographic Art (Carmel, CA), and the Griffin Museum of Photography (Winchester, MA). She is an active member of D’art Gallery, a co-operative organization in Denver’s Santa Fe Art District.
In addition to her artistic practice, Myers works as a Creative Director and Graphic Designer. She holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin – Madison and lives and works in Denver, Colorado.

Instagram: @mmyersphoto