Through their visual analysis of complex social realities, the 2020 Rachel Tanur Prize winners have highlighted the politics of identities, peoples and places are important themes. As an official partner of this prize, we are excited for you to meet the people behind these important insights, and to have the opportunity to engage with their work.

First Prize: Henry Moncrieff Zabaleta
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
Image title: Warao Queen: Challenging beauty in Venezuela
Rachel Tanur Memorial Prize Website

I am Venezuelan with a background as an anthropologist/photographer in Venezuela and France. I stepped into Sociology by exploring photographic essays of the lived realities of inhospitable places with indigenous people who refused to be seen as “vultures” in a garbage dump, and the micro-contradictions of socialism in cockfights. Although I felt like a social scientist with a camera, I was often symbolically labeled “photographer.” This experience in image production had social sensitivity, but I did not consider my photographs proper “sociological” work. I explored visual themes with “obvious contours” and without conceptual elaboration. As the political-social crisis erupted in Venezuela, I found refuge in Mexico where I was provided the space to explore visual sociology, and started doing so through Goffman’s dramaturgical perspective on “violent-looking” gang members.

I started to reinterpret my photographic work with a more mature sociological vision, so I explored President Chávez’s demand for national sovereignty and used my fieldnotes to retell the backstage of Estrella’s portrait for the Rachel Tanur Memorial Prize. In my professional career, this international award motivates me to continue as an interdisciplinary ethnographer linked to visual sociology, and today I consider myself a producer of “photographic data” in the field. My doctoral dissertation will explore the belongings of young people residing on the marginalised periphery of Mexico City. In my research I am committed to going beyond any dominant technical mode or aesthetics, contemplating new concepts, ethics, and visual research strategies with participants.

Second Prize: Pranathi Diwakar
University of Chicago
Image title: Writing on the Wall
Rachel Tanur Memorial Prize Website

I am a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Chicago, specialising in urban and cultural sociology. My research explores urban processes, cultural spaces, and social inequality. I captured Writing on the Wall when I was invited to a music video shoot as part of my ethnographic research project on musical practice, caste identity, and urban life in the southern Indian city of Chennai. Gaana songs challenge the discrimination meted out by privileged urban residents towards Gaana music, musicians, and slum residents. This photograph seeks to capture greater nuance in the representation of life in slums by taking seriously how participants in this musical world wish to represent themselves. I paired my photograph with Rachel Tanur’s image of street musicians on an Italian street as a counterpoint to illustrate how differently the street is imagined and occupied by artists whose presence on the street is deemed legitimate. With this entry, I hoped to highlight how marginal urban residents imagine themselves, rather than recreate tired visuals of abject poverty.

Through this process, I have learnt that visual research holds the key to reflecting on the scholarship we produce as social science researchers, and employing the visual medium profoundly impacts the way that we engage with the social world. Ethnographic research is bolstered by a keen visual engagement. Platforms like the Rachel Tanur Memorial Prize are important because they encourage visual analysis as a crucial component of research on social phenomena and support a humanistic approach to understanding human relationships and conditions. The Prize supports the creation of multidimensional and innovative representations of social phenomena and diverse spaces from around the world. Following my involvement in the Rachel Tanur Memorial Prize, I will continue to engage with the visual medium in my interactions with interlocutors and produce scholarship that takes seriously their own visual and aural representations of their lives and the scenes that constitute them.

Third Prize: Desirée Valadares
UC Berkeley
Image title: Absent Presence: Residential Barracks at Manzanar National Historic Site
Rachel Tanur Memorial Prize Website

I am a Canadian-trained landscape architect and Architectural History PhD student at UC Berkeley. The photograph Absent Presence belongs to a series that documents sites of World War II confinement or internment landscapes on the West Coast of the United States and Canada. The Rachel Tanur Memorial Prize provided the opportunity for me to use photography as a method to study these ruins and landscapes from a reflexive, embodied and engaged ethnographic practice as I attended annual pilgrimages to World War II confinement sites organized by the Japanese American and Canadian community from 2016-2018. Manzanar National Historic Site (pictured above) drew my attention not only to culturally-specific commemorative practices but also pointed to the various and often complicated forms of historic site designations that currently enshrine these lands.

I paired my image with Rachel Tanur’s photograph of an image of Maya ruins of Yucatan. I understood her image as critical commentary on tourism, archaeology, national heritage, memory and Indigeneity. Through this process I have learnt about the visual rhetoric of ruination and the role of photography and visual analysis in capturing and documenting ruins as evidence. My involvement in the Rachel Tanur Memorial Prize has encouraged me to further incorporate my own photography and critical insights in my larger dissertation project which centres on World War II incarceration sites outside of the Lower 48 states as they are recovered and remembered amidst outstanding Indigenous (Pacific Islander, Alaska Native and Coast Salish) land claims.