2008 CDS / Honickman First Book Prize in Photography Winner
Jenette Williams
The Bathers
Jennette Williams is a fine arts photography instructor at the School of Visual Arts in New York City and holds a master's degree from Yale University.
Jennette was selected for her stunning platinum prints and color photographs of women at European and Turkish bath houses.
Creating the images in The Bathers, Williams drew upon classical gestures and poses found in iconic paintings of nude women and utilized the platinum printing process to assure a sense of timelessness. "Williams sought to reflect the religious and mythological aspects of water, including birth and rebirth, comfort and healing, purification and blessing."
Over a period of eight years, Jennette traveled to Hungary and Turkey to photograph, "without sentimentality or objectification, women daring enough to stand naked before her camera."
Celebrated photographer Mary Ellen Mark judged the competition and chose Williams for the prize because of her "original and beautifully rendered" photographs. "Jennette is both an excellent documentary photographer and a superb portraitist - a rare combination. Jennette's photographs of women bathers in Budapest and Istanbul "take us inside spaces intimate and public, austere and sensuous, filled with water, steam, tile, stone, ethereal sunlight, and earthly flesh."
Jennette's work is in the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She has been featured in exhibitions at the Bonni Benrubi, Robert Mann, and Opsis galleries in New York; the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, and the Photography Gallery at Florida International University in Miami. Her images have also been featured in such publications as Blind Spot, the New York Times Magazine, and the Village Voice, as well as in the book The Spirit of Family by Al and Tipper Gore.
Jennette is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Resources
- The Center for Documentary Studies
- Daylight Magazine
- Photo District News
- Photo-Eye