2002 CDS / Honickman First Book Prize in Photography
Anna Kuperberg - Honorable Mention
Anna Kuperberg is a freelance photographer based in San Francisco. She received her BFA from Washington University in 1991 and her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1996. She spent three years photographing children who live in the urban Midwest. Specifically, the South Side of St. Louis, MO, a working class neighborhood that, as she described in her artist statement, "seems stuck in time." Once a strong, prosperous and beautiful industrial city, St. Louis is crumbling, another urban victim of suburban flight and abandoned buildings.
Home to Anheiser-Busch, Ralston-Purina, and Monsanto factories, Kuperberg photographed the children of the blue collar factory workers "who make these places run." Although the area is getting increasingly poorer and much more diverse, Anna's photographs bear witness to the vibrancy, activity and immediacy with which these children experience their world.
Her work is in the permanent collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the St. Louis Art Museum,and the Portland Art Museum.
Kuperberg was selected as one of American Photography's Top Ten Wedding Photographers in 2009. One of the images from her Children of St. Louis's South Side series was selected by Elliot Erwitt for inclusion in the book Fresh Milk: Friendship, Family, Love and Laughter (2009).