Carly Steinbrunn’s work with photography engages the broad history of medium, referencing its applications in various fields from anthropology to zoology. Her 2015 book The Voyage of Discovery obliquely riffed on the relationship of photography to exploration and colonial- era conquests. Her recent body of work submitted to the Hariban Award, “The Astronomical Unit,” continues this line of enquiry into photography’s simultaneous ability to catalog and obscure our surroundings. As an artist working with photography, she revels in the mysteries and contradictions posed by images. As Steinbrunn notes in her artist’s statement, her work is a “a conceptual exploration of the unknown focusing on the attempts and failures of photography to fix the world in images.”

– Michael Famighetti Juror, Hariban Award 2017

Bio

Carly Steinbrunn is a French artist born in 1982. Touching upon the realms of geography, botanics, anthropology and zoology, her work borrows from the varied approaches of the scientific register, but also from the history of photography, with an encyclopaedic curiosity reminiscent of the narratives of great explorers. Her first book The Voyage of Discovery was published by Mack in 2015. She is currently developing The Astronomical Unit, a conceptual exploration of the unknown focusing on the attempts and failures of photography to fix the world in images.