BAMPFA is pleased to announce that Lisa Kereszi is the 2005 recipient of The Baum Award for Emerging American Photographers. Through the generosity of Glenn and April Bucksbaum, with special support from The Martin Bucksbaum Family Foundation, this $10,000 cash grant honors a talented and innovative photographer at a critical moment in the development of his or her career. Twenty-five curators from across the country each nominated two photographers for the award. Ms. Kereszi was selected by a jury panel that included Catherine Wagner, artist and professor of art at Mills College; Robert Flynn Johnson, curator in charge of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Tara McDowell, curatorial associate, painting and sculpture, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Kevin E. Consey, BAMPFA director. In addition to the monetary gift Kereszi will receive, she will have three works on view this fall in the museum's Bancroft lobby, and one of her photographs will become part of the BAMPFA collection. Artists have long understood the iconic power of objects and the ways in which they have the potential to carry meaning that is simultaneously universal and highly individual. 2005 Baum Award winner Lisa Kereszi shares with many artists a belief in the power of objects, and her desire to animate their inherent vitality is consistently manifested in her photographs. Kereszi's particular relationship to objects naturally emerged from the experience of growing up with an auto junkyard as her family's business, and their regular excursions to secondhand stores and yard sales. These activities influenced her attraction to images that speak of the recent past, and her desire to capture those things that have disappeared or are in danger of being lost. In her recent series New York Stories (2000–2004), Kereszi focused on empty and abandoned spaces in such locations as Governors Island, Times Square, and Coney Island, which become settings for dramas constructed from detritus and traces of other people's lives. Kereszi considers the things she photographs to be “readymade” objects that she finds and captures. Aware that these objects are someone else's design, she refers to her photographs as sculpture. In Water Fountain, P.S. 26, Building 711, Governors Island, NY (2003) Kereszi has created a tension between an intensely orange wall and a close-up frontal view of the fountain that is set into a cavity in it, which has the effect of pushing the orange surface toward the picture plane. Similarly, in Theatre Floor, New Haven, Conn. (2001) she pairs her focus on the banal aspects of modern life with a strong interest in pictorial illusion, which is essential to the meaning of the work. The oblique angle of the theatrically lit carpet that fills the frame, its “night sky” design and spilled-popcorn “stars,” exemplify her tendency to infuse her mundane images with drama, as though they were stage sets replete with anticipation and history. Essential to Kereszi's vision is the fact that she does not manipulate her photographs, which sometimes achieves surprising results. While she generally sets her camera on a tripod, for Bus Stop with Sea Spray, Governors Island, NY (2003), she hand held it as a means to move and capture the light. This also created a trompe l'oeil quality-the bus shelter with water splashing up behind it appears to have been turned around-capturing the decisive moment and concretizing her belief that “truth is stranger than fiction.”
