The Eidolon Grant is an international programme that is presented annually to artists, academics, professionals, researchers, collectors and vernacular photography enthusiasts whose past work and proposed project is centred around the image heritage of everyday photography.
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.
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 Eidolon Grant in 2025:
Nathan Jurgenson
is a social media theorist and author of “The Social Photo: On photography and social media” (Verso Books, 2019). Nathan was founder and editor in chief of Real Life magazine (2016-2022). He co-founded and chaired the Theorizing the Web conference (2011-2020), and is editor emeritus at the New Inquiry. He also worked as Sociologist at Snap Inc (2013-2022). Much of this work centers on a critique of “digital dualism”, a phrase he coined to describe the false belief that the internet is a separate virtual sphere or cyber space. Instead, Nathan approaches digitality as embodied, material, and real. Nathan lives in Los Angeles, California.
Barbara Levine and Paige Ramey
are collectors, artists, and curators specialising in vernacular photography. Their photography collection, known as PhotoMania, was recently acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and their first collection of vintage photograph albums was acquired by the International Center of Photography in New York. They run Project B, an archive and collaborative curatorial venture.
Lev Manovich
is a Presidential Professor at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, an artist, and one of the most influential theorists of digital culture and art in the world. He has played a key role in creating a number four new research fields: new media and digital culture, software studies, cultural analytics, and AI aesthetics. Manovich is the author of 17 books, and his digital art projects have been exhibited at many prestigious institutions, such as the Institute of Contemporary Art (London), the Centre Pompidou, and the Shanghai Biennale.
Marcel Top
is a visual artist living and working between Belgium and London. He researches the topics of mass surveillance, privacy, and data collection. In his practice, he layers a traditional approach to documentary research with a more experimental use of new technologies (such as facial recognition, movement analysis, and deepfakes). He uses these technologies to visualise and examine scenarios in which people can protect themselves and their rights by gaining knowledge and reclaiming control of surveillance tools.
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.
