In 2001, The Honickman Foundation partnered with The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University to create a biennial publishing award—The Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography—which offers publication of a book of photography, a $3,000 award and inclusion in an exhibition of prizewinners.

The 2006 biennial prizewinner is Danny Wilcox Frazier, a freelance photographer who also teaches at the University of Iowa. His black-and-white images of rural Iowa was selected from four hundred entries in the third First Book Prize competition.

Robert Frank, one of America's most important and influential photographers, judged the competition and chose Frazier for the prize because of his "passionate photographs without sentimentality…his work reaches out: let me tell your story, it is important."

About the Competition
The only competition of its kind, The Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize competition is open to American photographers of any age who have never published a book-length work and who use their cameras for creative exploration, whether it be of places, people, or communities; of the natural or social world; of beauty at large or the lack of it; of objective or subjective realities. The prize honors work that is visually compelling, that bears witness, and that has integrity of purpose. Judging is based on submitted images carefully selected by the photographer to demonstrate a coherent body of work with the potential for publication. Submitted work must be from an on ongoing or completed project of the past three years.

As it relates to photography, The Honickman Foundation and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University are partners with similar goals. CDS connects the arts and humanities to documentary fieldwork, drawing upon photography, filmmaking, oral history, examination of contemporary society, the recognition of collaboration as central documentary work, and the presentation of experiences that heighten our historical and culture awareness. It is the aim of The Honickman Foundation to stimulate America's ever-growing and energetic photo-collecting universe into the full realization of photography's rich accomplishment and potential, both as an art form and as a tool for social change.

The next First Book Prize in Photography competition will be held in 2008.
Submissions, following guidelines format, must be postmarked between June 9 and September 5, 2008. The winning photographer will be announced publicly in January 2009. The book will be published in fall 2009. An exhibition of the first five winners' photographs will travel, beginning in fall 2011.
For more information, View the guidelines.

2004 Biennial Prize Winner: Stephen B. Smith

The 2004 biennial prizewinner is Steven B. Smith, a photography professor at the Rhode Island School of Design, who was selected for his series of black and white photographs of new construction sites in California, Utah, Nevada and Colorado.

Maria Morris Hambourg, Curator in Charge of the Department of Photographs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art was the judge for the prize competition and will write the introduction to Steven Smith's book, due to be published in Fall 2005.

Ms. Hambourg, said she chose Smith for the prize, "because of his intelligent choice of a subject hidden in full view that is of paramount importance. The mindless subjugation of the land to lockstep suburbia is wretched even when carried out in more forgiving terrain, but in an ecosystem as fragile as the desert, this misuse will be fatal unless it is shown and stopped."

"Smith's book about this short-sighted undertaking will be by turns humorous and piteous, elegaic and ironic, and cumulatively very powerful," Hambourg continued, "for he has shaped an essay from aesthetically elegant, delicately nuanced pictures that are pitch perfect, in the spirit of the American West and in keeping with its long history of fine photographs."

Steven Smith has a master's degree from the Yale School of Art. He has been awarded a Guggenheim and an Aaron Siskind Fellowship for Photography and has received an Eisenstadt award from Life magazine for work (from this project) that appeared in Double Take magazine. This collection of photographs of the manmade Western landscape will be his first book.

Smith's photographs were selected from close to three hundred entries in the second biennial First Book Prize competition.

2004 Honorable Mention: Lisa Kessler

Lisa Kessler, an editorial and documentary photographer based in Boston, received an Honorable Mention for her photographs on the Catholic Church's sexual abuse crisis.

Maria Hambourg admired her work "because of the seriousness and difficulty of her subject, which is of its very nature shameful and invisible. Her imaginative and foresightful treatment of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy is distinguished by an incisive choice of incident and succinct and graphic framing. Over a long period Kessler tracked not only newsworthy events and public demonstrations, but also private vistas of personal vulnerability, cowardice, anger, and relief to paint a complex picture of the long-term individual and collective consequence of these abominable crimes."

Ms. Kessler holds degrees from Brown University and Boston University and has won an Award of Excellence from the 2002 Pictures of the Year International Competition for her work from this project that appeared in a magazine story. She is also developing the work into an audio-visual book.

Ms. Kessler teaches photography at Northeastern University and also works for editorial, corporate and non-profit clients in the Boston area. View photos by Lisa Kessler.

Inaugural Prize Winner: Larry Schwarm

Kansas-based photographer Larry Schwarm won the inaugural prize competition for his series of color images capturing dramatic prairie fires that take place in his native state each spring. Renowned photographer Robert Adams, the prize's inaugural judge, said, "Larry Schwarm's photographs of fire on the prairie are so compelling that I cannot imagine any later photographer trying to do better. His pictures convince us that seemingly far away events are close by, relevant to any serious person's life." Schwarm's book, On Fire, is in its second printing. Read more about Larry Schwarm.