Donna Gordon: 2025 Denis Roussel Award Winner

Interdisciplinary artist and author Donna Gordon was awarded the 2025 Denis Roussel Award by means of Rfotofolio. Her submission featured a collection of beautiful photogravure portraits of girls located throughout the pure world, evoking up to date visions of Eve within the Garden of Eden. Juror Christopher James praised the work, writing, “This body of work is grounded in myth and meaning and is a satisfying experience for me as a visitor to the work.”

The Rfotofolio Denis Roussel Award is an annual worldwide images award established in 2018 to honor the legacy of photographer, educator, and different course of pioneer Denis Roussel. Organized by means of Rfotofolio, the award celebrates photographers working with historic and different photographic processes, together with silver gelatin, cyanotype, collodion, lumen prints, and different handmade methods. More than merely a grant program, the Denis Roussel Award displays the spirit of Roussel himself—an artist remembered for his generosity, curiosity, and perception that magnificence may very well be discovered in all places, even in probably the most atypical topics. The award was created to proceed his legacy of experimentation, craftsmanship, and mentorship throughout the photographic neighborhood.

Each 12 months, photographers from around the globe submit portfolios of seven pictures accompanied by an artist assertion describing each the work and the method behind it. The award is juried by outstanding figures within the subject of images and different processes, together with artist and educator Christopher James, whose long-standing involvement has helped form the award’s repute throughout the photographic neighborhood. At its core, the Denis Roussel Award champions gradual, tactile, process-driven images in an more and more digital age, supporting artists whose practices emphasize experimentation, materiality, and the handmade photographic object.

Today we share an interview with the artist and the founders of Rfotofolio. Rfotofolio is an impartial on-line images platform and neighborhood devoted to supporting up to date lens-based artists by means of exhibitions, interviews, portfolio options, training, and artist alternatives.

Donna Gordon is a Cambridge, MA based mostly figurative and portrait artist — embracing images, photograph switch, and photogravure — in several methods and at completely different occasions — to research, deconstruct, and rebuild the human kind.

She is presently a Scholar within the Brandeis University Women’s Studies Research Center by means of December 2027.

Her photogravures have been included in 2026 “Currents,” Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, and he or she acquired the 2025 Denis Roussel Award from Rfotofolio for a collection of photogravures. She was a 2024 MacDowell Fellow, and acquired the 2024 LensCulture Jurors’ Choice Award. She was awarded the 2024 and 2023 Julia Margaret Cameron Award for a portrait collection, with work exhibited at FotoNostrum Gallery, Barcelona.

Her work has been featured in Shots Magazine, Lenscratch, Dodho, The Hand, and Art.Doc. Prints, pictures, and drawings have been proven in each solo and group reveals on the Danforth Art Museum, Griffin Museum, Soho Photo Gallery, Bromfield Gallery, Fitchburg Art Museum, Cape Cod Museum and others.  Her work is in a number of non-public collections.

She’s represented by Bromfield Gallery, Boston.

Her work with former political prisoners in collaboration with Amnesty International culminated in “Putting Faces on the Unimaginable: Portraits and Interviews with Former Prisoners of Conscience,” exhibited at Harvard’s Fogg Museum.

Donna can also be a fiction author. Her debut novel, What Ben Franklin Would Have Told

Me, (Regal House 2022) was named by Kirkus Review among the many prime 100 Indie novels of 2023.

Instagram: @donnagordon8994

Would you please inform us about your self?

I’m a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based photographer and printmaker targeted on portrait and figurative topics. I’m additionally a fiction author, and revealed my first novel, What Ben Franklin Would Have Told Me, (Regal House) in 2022. As a baby, there was nothing higher than a sharpened pencil and a chunk of newsprint. That tactile high quality of creating marks on paper whether or not in pictures, photogravures, or different processes–are all an try to attach the created object with the human hand.

Where did you get your photographic coaching?

I don’t have a level in images, however have taken workshops to discover ways to work with historic and different processes. I graduated from Brown as a inventive writing main after which went to Stanford as a Wallace Stegner Fellow. I used to be writing poetry and fiction. And pondering visually. I received my first digicam after I was about 30. It was an Olympus OM 1. I labored at a non-public highschool outdoors of Boston and was requested to {photograph} the youngsters at their performs and musicals. The college paid for the digicam and a darkroom class at close by DeCordova Museum. My first self-initiated documentary venture was with Amnesty International. I interviewed and photographed fifteen folks from everywhere in the world who had been political prisoners and who have been on Amnesty’s audio system’ record. “Putting Faces on the Unimaginable,” portraits with captions was proven at Harvard’s Fogg Museum.

Please inform us in regards to the work you submitted to Denis Roussel Award.

The seven photogravures are all a part of “In the Garden,” begun as a collection of pictures of up to date ladies—together with trans, lesbian, and others-meant to refute the stereotype of Eve within the Garden of Eden. As a lot because it’s a political assertion, it’s actually about people. I’m fascinated by every of the faces and the tales behind them.

Please inform us about a picture (not your personal) that has stayed with you over time.

Käthe Kollwitz’s self- portrait, 1934, crayon and brush lithograph. Several of her self-portraits stick with me, however that is one I first noticed after I was a youngster and have by no means forgotten the depth and the methods through which I perceived her eyes made contact with mine. I really like the gritty high quality of her work, whether or not print, drawing, or sculpture.

What picture of yours would you say taught you an essential lesson?

Last winter, I took some leaps of religion with a really giant composition that mixed photograph switch and photo voltaic plate etching. The piece is possibly 54 inches lengthy and 40 inches excessive and printed on Kitakata. I hadn’t pre-planned the mixture and was transferring issues round on the glass counter prime within the printmaking studio. Eventually, the composition quietly constructed itself as a result of I trusted the truth that I didn’t know the place it was going. I stored transferring shapes round till it felt proper. Meaning is typically like that—recognizable after the actual fact.

Who has had an influence in your inventive course of?

 Photographers Graciela Iturbide, Lee Miller, Duane Michaels. Printmakers Kathe Kollwitz, Goya, Blake, Rauschenberg, Michael Mazur. And so many others. A portrait is a narrative of human character interpreted by means of mild and shadow. It has as a lot to do with emotion because it does with geometry. It’s a type of intentional coincidence—a coming collectively of what’s seen and unknown—and the strain between the 2.

Before studying to create photogravures, I made a big collection of paper lithographs, “Double Vision,” for which I transferred my pictures onto pronto plates and used liquid gum Arabic and water to make the switch onto BFK Rives. Around that point, I took a workshop at Maine Media and discovered about Ink Aid merchandise—their switch film and Transferiez medium. Last summer season I went to Cone Editions in Vermont and discovered to make use of Green Mountain plates to make photogravures.

What a part of image-making do you find probably the most rewarding?

Choosing a robust picture to work with. Then establishing technical specifications correctly in order that an intuitive flow can occur as soon as work has began. Getting the instruments proper, ink and paper. Setting the strain on the press. It’s usually a wordless starting, seemingly with out technique, however the decisions and intent make themselves identified throughout the course of. Printing the most effective picture can take a while by means of trial and error of inking and wiping. Deciding when the plate is able to print, trusting the second.

How do you’re employed by means of occasions when nothing appears to work?

For technical issues, I retrace my steps and examine to ensure I’ve ready my supplies accurately. Things can go unsuitable if there’s a wrinkle in a sheet of newsprint or a snag in a curler or brayer, or if timing is off if I’m engaged on a photograph switch or photogravure. In phrases of the picture itself, generally it’s onerous to judge. A bit of one thing is likely to be working, or it could result in rethinking about the best way issues fit or don’t fit collectively. Stepping again is at all times a good suggestion.

What instruments have you ever discovered important within the making of your work?

I hire studio time at Mixit Printmaking Studio (@mixit.printstudios) in Somerville, Massachusetts. I exploit the French Tool Press and Green Mountain plates developed by Jon and Cathy Cone of Cone Editions in Vermont. Recently, I’ve been working with Ralph Robinson @ralphrobinsonimagery of @shepherdmaudsleighstudio, Newton, MA,  to collaborate on new plates.These photopolymer plates are straightforward to work with. I like Hahnemühle Copper Plate for printing. For photograph switch and monotype, I like to make use of a roll of Agawami Kitakata and lower issues to measurement for giant items.

Is there one thing in images that you just wish to strive sooner or later?

I’d wish to make a big photogravure plate with a number of figures that will appear to be a kind of Roman frieze. It’s one thing I’ve tried drawing.

How does your artwork have an effect on the best way you see the world?

I’m a really visible particular person and am usually distracted by what I see. I’ve turn out to be a bit shameless after I see somebody whose look is extremely attention-grabbing and I need to attempt to seize that with the digicam. I generally really feel grasping and extroverted after I ask if I can {photograph} them, after I’m actually not like that more often than not.

What’s on the horizon?

My purpose is to create a e-book of photogravures from “In the Garden.” So far, I’ve photographed about 35 people and I’m hoping to extend the vary and variety earlier than sitting right down to curate. I’m on the lookout for a writer.