Jennette Williams' The Bathers is the winner of The Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography.

Jennette Williams, a fine arts photography instructor at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, has been selected to receive the fourth Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize Award in Photography for her stunning platinum prints and color photographs of women at European and Turkish bath houses.

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." Over a period of eight years, Williams traveled to Hungary and Turkey to photograph, "without sentimentality or objectification, women daring enough to stand naked before her camera."

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."

Jennette Williams is from New York City, has a master's degree from Yale University and has been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, a Golden Light Award from the Maine Photographic Workshops, and grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at the Bonni Benrubi and Robert Mann galleries, New York; the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego; and the Photography Gallery at Florida International University, 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. This collection of photographs of women bathers will be her first book.

About the Competition
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 a Web site devoted to presenting the work of the prize winners.

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.

Information about submission dates and deadlines will be posted in November 2009. For more information, view the guidelines.

Previous Recipients of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography:

• 2006: Danny Wilcox Frazier, Driftless
• 2004: Stephen B. Smith, The Weather and a Place to Live
• 2004 (Honorable Mention): Lisa Kessler, Photographs
• 2002: Larry Schwarm, On Fire

The 2006 biennial prizewinner was 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."

The 2004 biennial prizewinner was 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.

"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.

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.