Congratulations to the 2022 Giard Grant Winners
The Robert Giard Foundation, in partnership with Queer|Art, is excited to announce the winner of the Robert Giard Grant for Emerging LGBTQ+ Photographers, Chen Xiangyun ($10,000), and runner-up Camilo Godoy ($5,000). We also celebrate the excellent work of three finalists: Heesoo Kwon, Giancarlo Montes Santangelo, Fred Zucule.
Chen Xiangyun’s grant will support the further development of her series of intimate images portraying first- or second-generation immigrants who are people of color across the US. As a Chinese lesbian immigrant and photographic storyteller, Chen centers authentic visual representations of queer intimacy and vulnerability within POC communities. Her ongoing project depicts people of diverse ethnicities, identities, and regions, charting the emotional richness of queer life.
“This work is about centering images of queer intimacy and vulnerability, especially queer POC, through authentic visual representations of our worlds. […] I am making pictures that I wish I could have seen. Ever since I was a kid, I had dreamt about being told that it was possible to be gay and live an honest life. Looking back at the discrimination, shame, and guilt that I experienced, I want my pictures to say this to queer people who might be looking for courage like I was.”
–Chen Xiangyun
Camilo Godoy‘s project AMIGXS is a series of intimate photographs of friends and lovers engaged in acts of love and lust, exploring the shifting relationship among zines, published photographs, and billboards, inspired by the queer photographic and publishing legacy of the 20th century. Godoy’s grant will support the development and publication of a photobook of AMIGXS.
“AMIGXS is a project in which I represent and play with ideas about intimacy and exposure, private and public, and the shifting scales of zine and billboard. The photographs of AMIGXS celebrate friendship and insist on love as a way of life to imagine different subversive ways of being. I’ve had the privilege of presenting this project to be experienced as zines, small framed photographs, large-scale photographs to occupy an entire exhibition wall, and in public programs in which I invited artist friends to perform their work related to love and friendship. The relationship between shifting scales of zine, printed photograph, and billboard is one that I intend to continue in the photobook. I also desire to reference the history of erotic publications to explore ways to be in dialogue with past aesthetic and conceptual legacies.”
– Camilo Godoy
The Robert Giard Foundation is honored to support an ever-growing number of emerging LGBTQ+ photographers who are pushing the conversation forward, into the future.
Congratulations Chen and Camilo!