Project Statement:
These unposed images of my family explore how our needs and expectations are met and missed. I’m interested in how birth, death, and all the struggles and triumphs in between, impact us as individuals and as a family.
Artist Bio:
Emily Schiffer is a documentary photographer interested in the intersection between art, audience engagement and social change. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including an Audience Engagement Grant from the Open Society Foundation, an Emergency Fund Grant from the Magnum Foundation, the Arnold Newman Prize for New Directions in Portraiture, an Economic Hardship Reporting Project Grant, the Inge Morath Award, and a Fulbright Fellowship in Photography.
Emily has exhibited her photographs internationally at institutions including The Frankfurt Fotografie Forum, Germany; Espacio Fundacion Telefonica, Spain; Fotohof Gallery, Austria; The Farnsworth Museum, United States; and Photoville, New York City. Her work has also appeared in publications including Aperture, Smithsonian Magazine, PDN, TIME, The New Yorker, and Mother Jones.
Emily founded the “My Viewpoint Youth Photography Initiative” on the Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota, which ran for more than 10 years. In partnership with the Center for Urban Transformation and Magnum Foundation, she created “SEE POTENTIAL,” a public art project that installs documentary images on abandoned buildings to illustrate community-led economic development initiatives on the South Side of Chicago. In 2014, she co-created “Danube Revisited: The Inge Morath Truck Project,” a photographic road trip and traveling exhibition inside a 2T truck.
