Eidolon Centre for Everyday Photography invited artists, academics, enthusiasts, and professionals with a passion for vernacular photography and everyday imaging to share their ideas in two categories focused on exploring, promoting, and conserving vernacular photography. This year, we received 321 applications from around the world.
Our team spent weeks immersed in a wealth of thoughtful proposals. It was a true joy (and quite a bit of reading!) to experience the creativity, and insight of this wonderful and diverse community. We’re deeply grateful to everyone who shared their vision and passion for everyday photography with us.
This year’s submissions revealed an extraordinary range of perspectives – uncovering histories, collections, and practices that expand how we understand and engage with everyday images both in its past and present forms.
Click here if you would like to know more about the second Eidolon Grant's international jury
Following a truly inspiring and rewarding jury session, our 2025 jury – Nathan Jurgenson, Barbara Levine, Lev Manovich, Paige Ramey, Róza Tekla Szilágyi, and Marcel Top – selected five recipients for this year’s Eidolon Grant.
Let us introduce you the Eidolon Grantees of 2025:
Category 1 – Contemporary everyday photographic cultures
Amount distributed in this category:
10.500 EUR
Lucía Harari
Support for a video-essay titled 'Fuga Panamericana'
"The project Fuga Panamericana is presented as a video-essay based on an event that occurred in 2024: the escape of 46 horses from the Argentine Army along the Panamericana highway. This episode, barely witnessed live by a few people, circulated primarily through mediated versions: photographs taken at random, fragments of news broadcasts, and memes shared on social media. The escape—easily mistaken for a dreamlike scene or a piece of fiction generated by Artificial Intelligence—was collected by Lucía Harari into an immediate and collective archive.
A photograph from the project
The proposal is to work with photographs gathered online during that July 2024 day and in the days that followed, exploring how vernacular digital images—unplanned, low in technical quality, accidental, and yet pictorial—construct a contemporary visual narrative. The corpus of the “escape” becomes a mirror of our current ways of documenting and perceiving the world: screens that mediate, circulation that multiplies, and an instantaneity that dissolves within the massive flow of everyday images. The project is conceived as a video-essay in the form of documentary-fiction, in which it is not entirely clear whether what happened was a real event or a myth born from shared dreams, whether the images come from digital memory or were generated by artificial intelligences replicating gestures of the plausible. A cinematic reference is the short film La era del Nandú (Argentina, 1987) by Alan Pauls and Carlos Sorín. This ambiguity—between news archive and imagined narrative—aims to place the viewer in a space where history and dream intertwine. To deepen this indeterminacy, a philosopher, a historian, a psychologist, a sociologist, a journalist, and/or a statesman will be invited to offer their interpretations through interviews, expanding the visual record into a critical and speculative reflection on reality and its representation. This will also include a search for the amateur photographer who, from a bus, captured the image that illustrates this presentation."
Meinke ten Have
Support for realising a digital platform for her project titled 'How to Make a Home'
“For about three years I have been quietly collecting images of other people’s home interiors, screenshots from real estate websites where private rooms are staged for future owners to browse. These images are not meant to be looked at closely; they exist to give a good first impression, to sell the property and to help us imagine a new life there by smoothing over the traces of the one that came before. But I am drawn to the small and intimate details that these images provide. (...) Over time, my growing collection has become an ongoing process of sorting, re-capturing, and reorganising fragments of domestic life.
A photograph from the project
The more I collected, the more I began to notice patterns and repetitions. (...) Each image, when isolated, gives away something intimate, but when placed alongside others in the same category, something collective begins to emerge which feels like an unspoken language of domesticity. (...)
How to Make a Home is about paying attention to what usually goes unnoticed: small aesthetic decisions, forgotten objects, and fragments of intimacy that sit quietly within images never intended to be archived. It is also about time: the rooms in these images often no longer exist as they appear here. They have been renovated, repainted, sold, emptied. The online platform I intend to create would preserve these traces before they vanish entirely, while inviting new ways of understanding how we shape, inhabit, and remember our private worlds. However, this potential digital part of the project is not meant as a static collection but rather to serve as a vessel for extending the work into an online framework where new discoveries can be added and re-visited over time."
Category 2 – Everyday photographs of the past
Amount distributed in this category:
14.500 EUR
Jennifer Good
Support for an archival research resulting in a long-form essay titled 'The View from Nowhere: US Military Aerial Photography and the Fractured Family Archive'
"My maternal grandfather served as an aerial reconnaissance photographer with the US Navy during WWII between 1943-1945, mainly making stereoscopic aerial photographs in the South Pacific. His archive, which is stored in my uncle’s basement in Seattle, Washington, consists of plates and prints from the period of his military service, as well as many others – family photographs, holiday snapshots and records, made while on leave and after his return from the war until his death in his forties.
A photograph from the project
The US Navy aerial reconnaissance unit in which my grandfather served used technology and approaches pioneered in the previous World War by Edward Steichen, who also served in the US Navy in WWII. For me, as an historian of documentary photography, the connection with this important figure adds a compelling layer to my interest in this material. Steichen shaped the Navy’s WWII photographic style and priorities through his leadership of the Naval Aviation Photographic Unit, which influenced how combat and reconnaissance imagery was valued, archived, and even presented to the public. (...)
This research will involve travelling to the United States to access my grandfather’s archives of photographs, negatives and other documents from this period. Combined with online research into the digital holdings of the US National Archives and the Naval History & Heritage Command (NHHC) Photo Archives, the result will be a long-form article that will contribute to the discourse about this and related forms of aerial vision, alongside a personal narrative which builds upon my previous and forthcoming published auto-theoretical writing. This somewhat mysterious family archive has been talked about for as long as I can remember, but I have not had the chance to explore it in depth, my mother having moved to Ireland long before I was born. My project’s title, taken from Donna Haraway’s essay ‘Situated Knowledges’, denotes simultaneously the personal transatlantic legacy of my maternal family and identity, and my own ambivalent seeing ‘from nowhere’."
Patrick Pound
Support for a book that examines the medium of everyday printed-out vernacular photography of all kinds
"Findings – On found photography is not a photobook but a book all about vernacular photography, illustrated by striking examples. Having collected everyday photographs for over 30 years, and made a career of sorts, redeploying them in collections made to function as artworks, and having taught photographic history and contemporary art practice, and written on photography for two decades, this book will be theoretically informed but unashamedly personal and reflective in nature.
A photograph from the project
Much like the ‘nature’ of the ‘found’ photographs, it will be at once telling and sentimental. The text will be thoughtful, nuanced, and readable. This book very much aims to function in a similar way to Stephen Shore’s classic On the Nature of Photographs – a Primer where Shore spoke of the medium in short texts illustrated mainly by ‘art’ photographs. Findings will be a useful meditation on the world of everyday photography, informed and ‘illustrated’ by material examples from decades of collecting ‘found’ photographs as if on a dare.
While drawing on the tradition of Shore’s teaching aid cum primer, this book will be fundamentally informed by recent thinking through the digital turn, taking on board both media archaeology, and the algorithmic connectivity of the contemporary realm. Indeed, my searching, sorting, and collecting, as well as my curatorial form of artmaking, and my thinking through photography are all saturated in the algorithmic – in method, effect, and meaning. (...)
Findings – On found photography stems from the rising awareness that while photography remains the key medium of our age, photography isn’t quite what it used to be. That age is rapidly changing and the recently redundant vernacular image has plenty to say about the past, the present and the future."
Akshay Bhoan
A found photography archive reactivated as public work through three interconnected works
"In early 2025, I found a set of around 2000 negatives, discarded and decaying in a kabadi (junk) storage space in Delhi. Twenty-five nearly identical booklets, each filled with anonymous faces made not for memory but for identification: the smallest units of recognition. To look at them now, in a country where citizens are told that no document is ever enough to prove belonging, was to confront how fragile such images always were.
The negatives were brittle, their emulsions collapsing, yet contact sheets revealed hundreds of sitters, photographed in the same space over decades. The studio lens appeared democratic: everyone was framed alike. But once outside, these same images entered systems that divided mercilessly; stapled to ration cards, voter rolls, police files and visa applications. The image that equalised in the studio fractured in circulation.
During cleaning, a sticker revealed the name Studio Starlit. A search led me to Janakpuri, a neighbourhood built after Partition to house refugees, later home to Burmese and Afghan migrants. When I arrived, the studio was gone. (...)
The instability of recognition is not new. ID photographs in India circulate endlessly, stapled to forms, demanded at every threshold. But as my research deepened, I saw how these proofs are also denied: minority documents marked invalid, sitters labelled “illegal,” voter rolls distorted by photographs. Neutral portraits, once bureaucratic evidence, are now instruments of exclusion.
A photograph from the project
If the ID photograph once mediated recognition, today its logic continues in surveillance. In Mahavir Nagar, where the studio owners were said to have lived, lanes bristled with CCTV cameras. The street itself had become a new studio, producing portraits without consent. A man stopped me, suspicious of my camera. To ease his doubts, I asked him to photograph me instead, an inversion that exposed how fragile the act of looking has become.
Across these shifts, the image of recognition remains unstable: fragile in the past, overbearing in the present. What do these photographs mean now? Detached from their administrative anchors, they no longer verify but instead form a collective portrait, fragments of a community once photographed. The six-by-six frames carry no names, only the echo: we were here.
The grant will allow this archive to be reactivated as public work through three interconnected works. (...) This project connects vernacular image heritage ‘the ID photograph’ to urgent debates on citizenship, exclusion, and memory. It does not treat everyday photography as residue but as a volatile medium where rights are defined, denied, or reclaimed. By bridging the analogue studio and the digital surveillance state, it shows how images continue to mediate the fragile threshold of recognition."
The project descriptions are quoted from the grant winners' application materials.
In the coming weeks, we'll be introducing each grant winner and their projects across our social media platforms. We'll share updates on the realised projects and essays in the Eidolon Journal!
We have great news for those who missed the opportunity this year: the Eidolon Grant will be back in 2026!
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If you would like to see the original Eidolon Grant announcement click here – if you would like to know more about this year's jury click here and here.
