Dark Laboratory Photographic Narrative Essay Competition
The Dark Laboratory Photographic Narrative Essay Competition encourages the production and publication of multimedia forms of storytelling with an emphasis on visual culture. The winner will be awarded the Dark Laboratory Photographic Narrative Prize. Each year a new artist will be honored whose work centers Indigenous ways of seeing the world. The competition focuses on how photography can be used to narrate from emerging artists whose work centers on the relationality of Black and Indigenous themes and concerns.
This competition is part of Dark Laboratory’s ongoing commitment to Black and Indigenous co-production and our mission to provide a platform for innovative critical and creative explorations of the crossroads of Black and Indigenous lives. With this competition, we hope to encourage and support submission from underrepresented and, especially, rural communities.
The Dark Laboratory honors the arts. We consider the power of the camera to both suspend in time, preserving heritage, and to connect new, imagined, communal (interspecies) formations.
First and second prize winners, in two categories, are chosen by a distinguished panel of judges (industry professionals, artists, and Ithaca High School students).
Tracy Rector is an American filmmaker, curator, and arts advocate based in Seattle, Washington. She is the executive director and co-founder of Longhouse Media, an Indigenous and POC media arts organization and home of the nationally acclaimed program Native Lens.
Accra Shepp is a New York–based artist and writer. His images have been exhibited worldwide and are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and other institutions. His writing has appeared in The New York Times and the New York Review of Books as well as the artist book Atlas (in the collection of the Whitney Museum and the New York Public Library), and The Windbook, an artist-book installation at the National Library of Luxembourg. The installation, which explored ethnicity and national identity, was a year-long project where the book was outside, exposed to the elements with only the wind to turn its pages. He is currently working on a photo-based project titled “Covid Journals.”
Ayelen Dolores Simms is 15 years old and attends Ithaca High school. She is Afro-Latina, African-American and Puerto Rican. She is a student athlete that enjoys creating art and spreading truth, love and positivity.
Landscape Photographic Series
First Prize: Allison Arteaga
Second Prize: steve núñez
Photographic Portraiture
First Prize: Abigail Hadeed
Second Prize: Nadia Huggins
Portraiture Honorable Mention: Dóra Papp and Melia Delsol
Landscape Honorable Mention: Kai Pyle
The 2022 Dark Lab Prize in Photographic Narrative honors esteemed photographer Ernie Paniccioli. His archive at the Cornell Hip Hop Collection is the focal point and focus as we shift from ecologies to urban and metropolitan environments, cultures and vernaculars of the street.
Ernie Paniccioli
Ernie Paniccioli is the author of Hip Hop at the End of the World and Who Shot Ya? He first made his foray into the culture in 1973 when he began capturing the ever present graffiti art dominating New York City. Armed with a 35-millimeter camera, Paniccioli has recorded the entire evolution of Hip Hop. Paniccioli, himself Native American, is known for his special eye for capturing people and communities ignored or misunderstood by mainstream America. Starting with snapping pics (a priceless history) of graffiti art in 1973 in NYC, he evolved to become the pictorial archeologist of Hip Hop much like James Van Der Zee did for 1920’s Harlem and Edward S. Curtis’ monumental prints did for the Native peoples of North America.
Regarded by the Hip Hop community as being their premier American photographer is the best-selling author of Who Shot Ya and Hip Hop at the End of the World, a Hip Hop Hall of Fame inductee, recipient of the Zulu Nation Human Soul Award, creator of The Other Side of Hip Hop (named best documentary in 2007), and whose works are featured in Cornell University’s famed Hip Hop Collection.