The Denis Roussel Award was started in 2018 to honor the legacy of photographer and educator Denis Roussel and to highlight work done by photographers whose work is based on the historical/alternative photographic processes, including silver gelatin.
We would like to thank juror, author, and educator Christopher James who spent long hours reviewing the submissions. We know of no other competition where the photographers who are selected are given care and handling in the way their work receives personal comments from the juror with observations and recommendations for future work.
Thank you to all of the photographers who applied for this award. The standard is set higher each year. This year was incredibly hard to chose who would receive awards. It was very rewarding to see the wonderful work being submitted and to read your statements. We were introduced to numerous new artist and know many of you will be recognized in the years to come. Keep creating. We will be publishing the entire portfolios as we publish the artist interviews.
A special thank you to the Roussel Family and Josephine Sacabo for your ongoing support of the Denis Roussel Award and Rfotofolio.
Thank you Denis for your inspiration.
Thank you to the following individuals and businesses.
Mark Nelson for the your support.
Bostick & Sullivan for your support from the very beginning.
Christopher James for his donation of a portfolio review.
Statement from Christopher James
Dear All,
Over the past seven years, I’ve had the privilege of collaborating with Connie and Jerry Rosenthal of Rfotofolio and serving as juror for the annual Denis Roussel Award. Each year, I’ve been moved by the narratives and deeply personal work submitted by international artists conceptually exploring their lives, ideas, memories and story-telling through hand-made alternative and integrated photographic processes.
Throughout my experience as juror for this unique competition, I’ve witnessed evolving commitments to visual translations of each artist’s personal experience, explorations of their identity, and philosophical reflections on their relationship with our planet. These important explorations emerge through the use of simple elements — salt, chemistry, water, botanicals and marks made by hand. That stew invites creative play and embraces human imagination, the unpredictable, and the thrill of the accident that often evolves into an artist’s signature style. If you have read to this part, I trust that you will fully appreciate the last sentence.
In my 2023 juror’s statement I wrote that the criteria I use as a marker for selections is respect for the essential spirit of the Denis Roussel Award… a love of the natural world, finding muse-worthy inspiration in the humble and non-spectacular discoveries of simple observation… and a dedication to images made by hand. That sentiment continues to be true in this 2026 competition and is echoed in the care and honesty found in each applicant’s writing. It is indeed rare for a juror to receive written expressions of concept and intention alongside the work and in my experience, only the Roussel competition fosters this marriage of personal language and image.
As you review this year’s selections, and my written responses, please know that they simply represent a glimpse of my reflections over several weeks of returning to the work, reading the artist’s writing and responding to it. In no way are the awards judgments of the artist, their concepts, ideas and passion for the work they have entered for review as the small portfolio samplings reflect only a small part of each artist’s studio practice and body of work.
The Denis Roussel Award is a singular event in my experience. It attracts and welcomes artists devoted to photographic image-making, light-marking, and hand-crafted processes. It offers a rare opportunity to tell one’s story in context with their studio practice — and uniquely, it invites the juror into a dialogue that is both personal and constructive. It was, as always, an honor to share in this experience with you all… thank you.
Christopher James
August 2026
Dublin Studio Workshops
And now to the award winners for the 2026 Denis Roussel Awards.
2026 Denis Roussel Award
Aindreas Scholz
Cyanotype
“I think your work is quite wonderful and that the camera-less images in your submission are primarily concerned with the crisis in our ecology, our responsibilities to the dwindling resources of our planet, and as you state in the work’s synopsis, “the relationship between historical and alternative photographic processes and the climate emergency.”
These painterly and gestural works have been symbiotically created using the simple iron-based cyanotype process — ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide in collaboration with polluted seawater, acidic rain and sunlight. Your images are alive… and likely impermanent… which I feel is entirely appropriate to the spirit in which they are made and what that impermanence represents. The seawater evaporates and salt crystals, the literal and fundamental essence of photography, form on the surface of the print. The textural beauty found in your prints represent 96.5% of the earth’s primary liquid, salt water, in an increasingly compromised transition, and in context, the destruction of what constitutes life… water and salt.
In ancient Rome, when a person was stricken by love, they were described as being in a state of salax, or in a salted state? Salt is also the reason some wild animals ended up domesticated, the only rock obsessively eaten by everyone, and the primary component in the discovery of photography. Those small facts make these salted images immensely personal and like most seductively beautiful things, they come with a warning.
I feel that their message, their warning, might be intensified by the scale of the images. Your installation shot is impressive and I’m guessing that the dimension of the construction is about 2.5’ x 9’ but what I would love to see, perhaps as a first contact in an exhibition, is a digital reproduction of a single image at a 40” x 60” scale. I believe the work is powerful enough in texture (your haptic term applies here) and coloration to command your viewer’s attention to the entirety of your exhibition.
Your work is, for me, profoundly beautiful and a warning of tragic consequences. In the spirit of Denis Roussel, your materials, concept and execution are integrated and among my favorite works in this year’s competition.” Christopher James
Merit Award
Mitch Eckert
Kallitype
I’m intrigued with your studio practice, in Everlasting Remains, of making paper casts of plastic produce and retail containers that will doubly function as substrates and subject in your beautiful kallitype prints. I like your work a lot. I also have a few questions regarding the conceptual language you used in discussing it with a new viewer… me. But first, if you are not familiar with the work of Thomas Demand I strongly recommend him to you. In a nutshell, Demand curates found photographs and then constructs exact physical replicas of the image’s content out of colored paper and cardboard, which he then photographs with a large format camera before destroying the physical replica… leaving the new photograph as the sole evidence of his discovery. Your paper reconstructions are engaged in a different way and that leads to my questions.
In your writing you indicate that your constructed images, “move between shrine, offering, repository and ruin.” Is the shrine like a domestic retablo or a trigger for contemplation? Is your work an offering? To whom? Is your term repository referring to a protected collection where your objects / photographs are managed and curated for study? Does your term ruin indicate that the subjects are in the process of decay or are your images a warning of the decay our environment and chemically treated and plastic wrapped foods are immersed in already?
You write that your work is informed by Dutch still life (I’m presuming the 17th c. work that celebrated all the wonderful things that wealth and privilege could provide) and memento mori, a philosophical construct on living and a reminder that everything dies? From a classicist’s perspective, the term is a lesson that it is important to appreciate the moment you are living in and to treat each of those moments with moral integrity. In this context, I’m not sure momento mori works as a term. Are you creating a clear distinction between your refabricated paper containers and what they once held? I suspect you are emphasizing that everything beautiful and delicious has a very brief moment in the sun. I also suspect that the transformation to paper is required to have a substrate that kallitypes can be rendered on. A thought… consider changing the scale of your paper containers as a way of altering the context of the works and emphasizing the sculptural effort you are putting into making the casts. This might bestow the cast-work with a status equal to the kallitype printing process you excel at and the important message of your subjects.… an integrated balance of craft, concept and genres. Great work!
Merit Award
Işık Kaya & Thomas Georg Blank
I love the concept of this body of work especially in context with this sentence in your synopsis, “the physical act of making a photograph, and the substances that making involves, are inseparable from its meaning.” That’s wonderful and not only is it a perfect sentiment of the legacy of making photographs by hand, it also represents a novel marriage of material and message that rings close to the heart of this annual competition.
I’m curious about your thoughts relating to the work in exhibition and if it is affected by the formality of a gallery’s “white cube” that has defined worthy and finished “art” for the last century. The crux of your work is, for me, the evolutionary process of making the work, and that is the art, rather than the finished piece on the wall or commercial gallery exhibition. If that is the case, it leads me to the question of whether the work is ever finished since it is, after all, alive, morphing and changing form through continuous transition… until the lights are turned off. Is turning off the exposure the end or completion of the work?
None of my questions are a negative critique of what you are creating. For me, the meaning of the making in your work is more vital in conversation than the subjects represented — such as Binh Danh’s Vietnam anthotypes, the transformation of materials in the works of Anselm Kiefer or the Tending the Flame work of Brian David Griffith, where he expresses the relationships of nature and humanity via the medium of fire. As with cooking, the making is far more personal than the eating. In the spirit of the Denis Roussel competition, your work is a perfect reflection.
Christopher James Award Portfolio Review
Amy Lovera
Silver-gelatin photograms
There is a lovely narrative to this body of camera-less work. Storytelling perhaps is a better translation of their meaning as they are exponentially more than static images in their meaning and require, in my experience with them, that the viewer reflect upon their own lives and stories. They become mirrors.
In the most salient way I can think of describing their presence and importance, they feel like homages to the visual spirit of my friend, Martha Madigan (1950 – 2022), who made large scale photograms, in collaboration with her daughters, of the connective experiences of mother, child and the fragile and the fleeting transitions of time in those most special relationships. For me, your body of work is equally worthy and important. But unlike Martha’s beautiful and botanically textured works, they are, for me, more dedicated to the familial influences and experiences of mother and daughter than to the impermanence of childhood, and metaphorically, the changing of seasons in the natural world.
What makes your work different for me is the pure celebration of the kinetic energy of children and the visual definition of childhood-wonder and discovery. I love the scale of the images and the way you have integrated physical objects with the phantoms of your children’s memories… they are wonderful narratives and I would be delighted with this portfolio if I happened to come upon it in a gallery. Great work!
2026 Denis Roussel Award Rfotofolio Selection
Seth Adam Cook
Chromoskedasic Sabattier
We have all lived through or noticed how extreme our weather has been around the world this year. The argument that has emerged between scientists and “deniers” has been puzzling to us. We believe that humans were put on this earth to be shepards for the planet and the living things that happen to dwell here. Your work in its’ own way raises the question about how mans work in the Atchafalaya Basin has effected the wetlands and the surrounding area and drainage around the wetlands.
Your Choice of the Chromoskedasic Sabattier process draws attention to your photographs yet maintains the seriousness they present. All we can say is well done.We hope your work will be viewed by many others and serve as an example for other artists who live and work on this planet.
To encourage creative work and the gifted practitioners that created it we are recognizing the following work as chosen by Christopher James and Rfotofolio
Special Recognition
Sarah Ketelaars
Cyanotype
Sergiy Ledediev
Cyanotype / Ferroblend
Ludovica Limido
Cyanotype
Thank you to all the photographers who have shared their work with us.
About Christopher James
Christopher James – Professor Emeritus
Director, MFA Photography and Integrated Media 2011 – 2024
Christopher James is an internationally known artist and photographer whose photographs, paintings, prints and alternative process works have been exhibited in museums and galleries in this country and abroad. His work has been published and shown extensively, including solo and group exhibitions in the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, George Eastman House, Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Institute of Contemporary Art – Boston. Represented by the Lee Witkin Gallery in New York City for over two decades he has also exhibited at Pace-McGill (NYC), Contrasts Gallery (London), Michelle Chomette (Paris), Hartje Gallery and Photokina (Berlin), Centre d’Art Contemporain (Geneva), Rosa Esman Gallery (New York), Carpenter Center (Harvard) and Lizardi Harp Gallery (Los Angeles). Christopher has published extensively including Aperture, Camera (Switzerland), American Photographer, Solstice (for short fiction), and Interview magazine and in books such as The Antiquarian Avant Garde, á Prova de Aguà: Waterproof, Human Documents, and Handcrafted: The Art and Practice of the Handmade Print(China).
All three editions of his book, The Book of Alternative Photographic Processes have received international critical acclaim and are universally recognized by artists, curators, historians, and educators as the definitive text in the genre of alternative photography and photographically integrated media. A significantly expanded 900 page / 700 image, 3rd edition, was published in 2016. Christopher, after 13 years as an Associate Professor at Harvard University, is presently Professor Emeritus and the creator and former Director of the MFA in Photography and Integrated Media program at Lesley University College of Art and Design (2011-2024). He received his undergraduate degree from Massachusetts College of Art and his masters from the Rhode Island School of Design. He is a photographer, printmaker, painter, graphic designer, author and a professional scuba diver. Please visit Christopher’s web site by clicking on his name .
About Denis Roussel
If you where lucky enough to have a conversation with Denis or to be a student of his you knew how much Denis loved photography. He was always willing to share his knowledge with others.
Denis worked on projects where even the compost bin was his muse, showing us that there is beauty everywhere. His landscapes and portraits have been an inspiration to many.
Their beauty transcends time.
He was an educator as well as a gifted artist.
In 2017, Denis lost his battle with cancer. All of us lost the pleasure of seeing new work and learning from this creative and resourceful artist. His work and generous spirit inspires us and is the foundation of the Denis Roussel Award.
To learn more about Denis Roussel please visit his page at Denis Roussel.
To learn more about the work of these artist please click on their names.
Işık Kaya & Thomas Georg Blank
Sergiy Ledediev
Ludovica Limido
