Marina Gadonneix has won the 2018 LUMA Rencontres Dummy Book Award and a €25,000 award to publish her project, Phénomènes. Shot in various laboratories, Phénomènes considers the paradox at the heart of these places – microcosms of larger environments, but microcosms in which nature is strictly measured and controlled.
Born in Paris in 1977 and graduating from the l’École nationale supérieure de la photographie d’Arles in 2002, Gadonneix specialises in creating photographing highly specialised and controlled zones, creating works which “play with the clash of document, simulation and fiction”. Gadonneix won the Prix HSBC pour la photographie in 2006 for a project called Remote Control, a series of empty TV sets.
She has previously published two books, both with RVB Books – The House That Burns Every Day (2012), a look at dummy houses used by fire fighters to practice beating back flames; and Landscapes (2011), a collection of green or blue overlays used by TV and films as neutral backgrounds on which to overlay special effects.
The LUMA Rencontres Dummy Book Award jury also awarded a Special Mention this year to Indré Urbonaité’s State of Shame, hoping it would “motivate a publishing house to take interest in her work”. The project is a series of found images which have been taken in court, and which show suspects who are still on trial. These suspects have not yet been found innocent or guilty but these images have been published in the media anyway, and their efforts to conceal their own identity records the element of public shaming in this exposure. Urbonaité has isolated the shapes of the suspects, picking them out from the backgrounds into which they are trying to shrink.
Born in 1986 in Lithuania, Urbonaité graduated in photography from the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague in 2017 with State of Shame as her final project. This year she was also shortlisted for the Seeking the Latest in Photography Award at Riga Photography Biennial.
This year the LUMA Rencontres Dummy Book Award jury was: Émilie Lauriola, Le Bal Books; Maja Hoffman, founder of the LUMA Foundation; Matthieu Humery, director of the LUMA Foundation’s Living Archive Program; Jérôme Sother, co-director of the GwinZegal art centre; and Sam Stourdzé, director of Les Rencontres d’Arles.
The LUMA Rencontres Dummy Book Award has been running since 2015, shortlisting 20 books per year. The previous winners are: Grozny: Nine Cities by Olga Kravets, Maria Morina, Anna Shpakova, and Oksana Yushko, which won in 2017; You and Me by Katja Stuke and Oliver Sieber, which won in 2016; and The Jungle Book by Yann Gross, which won in 2015.
The 18 other books shortlisted for the 2018 LUMA Rencontres Dummy Book Award were:
Mario Capriotti, 42.334N, 13.334E
Max Ernst Stockburger, アメリカ(Amerika)
Michal Siarek, Alexander
Martin Magtorn, Daddy Cool
Angeniet Berkers, Echo
Siska Vandecasteele, Forain, Kaffers en Boerin
Federico Clavarino, Hereafter
Piergiorgio Casotti and Emanuele Brutti, Index G
Alexandre Guirkinger, Lost Island
Vittorio Mortarotti and Anush Hamzehian, Most Were Silent
Kevin Kunstadt, One-Car-Bazaar
Alfonso Moral Rodriguez, Phoenicia: Irrational catalogue
Melissa Bennett, Raimundo, Reading David Goldblatt’s on the Mines
Jens Schwarz, Themmuns
Giancarlo Shibayama, The Shibayamas
Muriel Schouten, Ways of understanding, Voodoo/Vodun
Lewis Bush, Wv.B/ English
Schore Mehrdju, you never told me about your time in prison
https://www.rencontres-arles.com/en/luma-rencontres-dummy-book-award-arles-2018/
