UConn Photography Professor Awarded 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship

STORRS, CT — Janet Pritchard, a professor of photography in the University of Connecticut's Department of Art and Art History, whose work as a landscape photographer is exhibited in galleries and museums across the United States and in the United Kingdom, has received a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship.

The announcement was made Wednesday by university officials.

Guggenheim Fellowships are awarded by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to artists who have "demonstrated exceptional capacity for significant exhibition or performance of their work or who have productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability and a significant record of publication as writers, scholars and scientists."

Pritchard’s photography is part of prestigious permanent collections in venues including the American Antiquarian Society, George Eastman House, National Trust for Historic Preservation, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Polaroid Corporation, Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art, Roman Vindolanda Museum in Northumberland, U.K. and Yellowstone National Park Museum.

The Guggenheim Fellowship will help support her current project, "More than a River: The Connecticut River Watershed," for which she photographs the Connecticut River landscape as "a complex set of interconnected systems where present bumps up against past in telling ways."

The image below is one example — the Founders Bridge in Hartford, in 2018. The Founders is one of three bridges in Hartford. It opened as a toll bridge in 1957 and was rebuilt in the 1990s as part of Riverfront Recapture, a segment of a larger urban renewal movement in the 1980s.

Janet Pritchard

"My Guggenheim year will allow me time to dig more deeply into the research and field work necessary to identify a few significant topics from which to weave the larger story I have to tell," she says. "I’m interested in the regional history of precision manufacturing and tobacco farming, as well as more recent stories about environmental stewardship, organic agriculture, and craft spirits. While working I ask myself such fundamental questions as: How does the land/riverscape impact the lives of people who call it home? Conversely I also ask: How do those lives impact the land/riverscapes as natural systems?” Then I seek sites where traces of these stories emerge and point my camera at interesting facts while striving to make visually compelling photographs."

Her photography of Yellowstone National Park, "More than Scenery: Yellowstone, an American Love Story," which views the world’s first national park through the lenses of nature, culture, and history, is scheduled for publication in fall 2020 by George F. Thompson Publishing in association with the American Land Publishing Project.

For more information go to UConn Today.