Eidolon Centre for Everyday Photography is calling artists, academics, enthusiasts. and professionals, who have a passion and serious interest in vernacular photography and everyday imaging.
The primary mission of the Eidolon Centre for Everyday Photography is to draw attention to the yet-uncovered themes, marginalised histories and innovative interpretations of vernacular and everyday imageries. The Eidolon Grant aims to identify phenomena, collections, histories, practices, and trends within vernacular photography with the aim of offering new interpretations and analyses. Thematising both photographic heritages and contemporary photographic practices is Eidolon’s mission and we invite you to join us in this important exploration. Each chosen project will contribute to the enrichment of our institution's program in the coming year.
You can find every important detail about the grant and the application process here.
Let us introduce the jury who will review the applications and choose the receivers of the first Eidolon Grant in 2024:
Özge Calafato
Özge Calafato is Lecturer in Literary and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests lie at the intersection of photography, archives, memory and cultural identity. Her book Making the Modern Turkish Citizen: Vernacular Photography in the Early Republican Era (I.B. Tauris, 2022) explores the photographic self-representations of the urban middle classes in Turkey in the 1920s and the 1930s. Between 2014 and 2020 she worked as the Assistant Director for the Akkasah: Center for Photography at the New York University Abu Dhabi.
Mattie Colquhoun
Mattie Colquhoun is a writer, blogger and photographer based in the UK. They are recognised for their contributions to the work of Mark Fisher, most notably, in their debut book, Egress which came out in 2020 and explored themes of community and grief following their late lecturer’s passing. Additionally, they have transcribed and edited Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire lectures and have contributed numerous essays to reissues and translations of his works. Mattie Colquhoun’s most recent book Narcissus in Bloom: An Alternative History of the Selfie was published on Repeater Books and presents an alternative interpretation of the selfie, positioning it as a reflection of broader political discontent and a desire for self-transformation, rather than solely a postmodern pathology.
Christopher Pinney
Christopher Pinney is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology and Visual Culture at University College London. His publications include Camera Indicia: The Social Life of Indian Photographs (Reaktion 1997) The Coming of Photography in India (British Library, 2008), and (together with the photographer Suresh Punjabi) Artisan Camera: Studio Photography from Central India (Tara, 2013). He led the ERC funded project “PhotoDemos” which resulted in the collectively edited volume Citizens of Photography: The Camera and Political Imagination (Duke, 2023).
Joachim Schmid
Joachim Schmid (born in 1955) is a German artist based in Berlin who is primarily known for his work focusing on vernacular photography. Schmid attended the University of Design in Schwabisch Gmund and the Berlin University of the Arts from 1976 to 1981. His career initially began by writing essays for Fotokritik, where he quickly gained recognition for his unwavering critique of established concepts in art photography with which he advocated for a comprehensive and inclusive assessment of photography as a cultural endeavour. In the late 1980s, Schmid began creating his own artworks and projects using imagery not produced in an art context. Besides many projects like The First General Collection of Used Photographs (1991) & The ABC of Popular Desire (2013), one of his most renowned works is the series titled Other People’s Photographs (2008-2011), in which he self-published ninety-six books featuring photographs sourced from online platforms such as Flickr.
Róza Tekla Szilágyi
Róza Tekla Szilágyi is the director of Eidolon Centre for Everyday Photography. She lives and works in Budapest. Her main interest is the fact that everyday photography's cultural importance is often overlooked though it represents the larger part of our image heritage from the last 200 years.
