Carrie Mae Weems. Hasselblad Award Laureate 2023

Portrait: Carrie Mae Weems © Rolex/Audoin Desforges

The Hasselblad Foundation is delighted to announce Carrie Mae Weems as the 2023 Hasselblad Award laureate.

Carrie Mae Weems:
“In the midst of the radical shifts taking place across cultural institutions, and as the first African American woman to receive the Hasselblad Award, some might say, ‘it’s about time!’ Nevertheless, receiving the Hasselblad Award has left me speechless. I don’t have the words to express the depth of my gratitude. To have my family name inscribed on this historic roster, alongside some of the most outstanding photographers of our time, is a cherished honor. To be recognized comes with the continued responsibility to deliver on the promise made to myself and to the field, which is to shine a light into the darker corners of our time and thereby, with a sense of grace and humility, illuminate a path forward. For this honor, I thank the Hasselblad Foundation and the jury.”

Carrie Mae Weems will receive a gold medal and the sum of SEK 2,000,000. The award also includes a medium-format Hasselblad camera from the Gothenburg-based camera company Hasselblad.

The award ceremony will take place in Gothenburg, Sweden on 13 October 2023. That same day, an exhibition of Carrie Mae Weems’s work will open at the Hasselblad Center and a new publication about the artist will be released.

The Hasselblad Foundation’s citation regarding the Hasselblad Award laureate 2023, Carrie Mae Weems:

Carrie Mae Weems’s work has for decades anticipated salient issues of our time – the struggle for racial equality and human rights – with unflinching visual and ethical force. Her artistic practice is inherently activist, poignant, and lyrical. She creates evocative, potent tableaux and confronts painful histories, institutional power, and social discriminations. At the core of Weems’s wide-ranging oeuvre is the still photograph, but she also deftly employs video, text, immersive multimedia installations, and performance. She often inserts herself in her work, thus embodying and commemorating the Black female subject.

The jury which submitted its proposal to the Hasselblad Foundation’s Board of Directors this year:

Joshua Chuang, Jury chair, independent curator, USA
Elvira Dyangani Ose, Director, Museu d’Art Contemporàni de Barcelona (MACBA), Spain
John Fleetwood, Educator and curator; director of Photo:, South Africa; co-head of photography, Royal Academy of Art, the Hague, Netherlands
Başak Şenova, Independent curator and senior postdoctoral researcher at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, Austria and Turkey
Francesco Zanot, Independent curator, Italy
Karolina Ziębińska-Lewandowska, Director, Museum of Warsaw, Poland

About the Hasselblad Award
The Hasselblad Award is an international photography prize that was awarded for the first time in 1980 to the Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson. Since then, it has been presented annually, with the exception of 1983 and 2021.

The Hasselblad Award is granted to “a photographer recognized for major achievements”, as stated in the last will of Erna and Victor Hasselblad.

>From 2022 the award comprises the sum of SEK 2,000,000, a gold medal and a diploma. The award's winner is usually announced 8th of March, the birthday of Victor Hasselblad.

Hasselbladstiftelsen
Hasselblad Foundation

Ekmansgatan 8, 412 56 Göteborg
www.hasselbladfoundation.se


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