The San Francisco Foundation announced this week that Dodd Assistant Professor of Photography Marni Shindelman and her collaborator, Nate Larson of MICA in Baltimore, are recipients of the 2016 John Gutmann Photography Fellowship. The annual award is given to emerging artists who exhibit professional accomplishment, serious artistic commitment, and financial need in the field of creative photography.

The prestigious award, established by the late photographer John Gutmann and administered by The San Francisco Foundation, brings with it $5,000 each to support the development of Larson and Shindelman’s collaborative creative work. Eminent photographers and curators Reagan Louie, Richard Misrach and Sandra Phillips were this year’s jurors. “This year’s work was once again outstanding and posed difficult choices. We selected two projects that are inventive, topical, and although already compelling, full of potential,” said Reagan Louie, Gutmann Fellowship juror and photography professor at San Francisco Art Institute.  

Larson and Shindelman’s project, Geolocation, uses publicly available embedded GPS information in Twitter updates to track the locations of user posts and make photographs to mark the location in the real world. They photographed sites linked to #ThanksPutinForThis in St. Petersburg and Moscow and are now working on photographing #ThanksObama in Chicago and Los Angeles, the sister cities to St. Petersburg and Moscow.

Louie said of Shindelman and Larson, “Innovative and resourceful, they are exploring the various ways new media, digital, social are being deployed, consumed, specifically ‘analyzing the use of the hashtag as a gathering point for ideas online.'”