CPW Vision Award Winners Highlight Racial, Cultural, and Women’s Issues

The Center for Photography at Woodstock in Kingston, NY, announced its four eye-opening 2025 Vision Awards winners.

The not-for-profit arts organization Center for Photography at Woodstock (CPW) was founded in 1977. CPW has a dual mission: “to support artists working in photography and related media, and to engage audiences through creation, discovery, and learning.”

To further its mission, the organization hosts exhibitions in its newly renovated headquarters in a historic 40,000-square-foot former cigar factory building.

“We are especially proud this year to celebrate an exceptional and diverse group of honorees for the 2025 CPW Vision Awards,” says Brian Wallis, CPW Executive Director. “Each remarkable recipient has re-drawn the boundaries of photography, inviting us to see afresh the history of the medium and to consider how photography shapes our sense of beauty, personal identity, and social transformation.”

For their Vision Awards in 2025, the Lifetime Achievement Award goes to Sally Mann (American, b. 1951). Mann is known for her evocative black-and-white photography depicting her family, landscape, and social aspects, such as young womanhood and illness. She’s most known for her series Immediate Family (1984-91), which features portraits of her children. Her most recent works are studies of the American South, Deep South (2005), and what she describes as “the human condition” with Proud Flesh (2009).

Mann has won multiple awards over her career, including a Guggenheim fellowship and three National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. Her work has been exhibited in prestigious major museums and galleries, from the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the National Gallery of Art to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She is also known through her bestselling memoir, Hold Still (2016), as well as her photography books At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women (1988), Immediate Family (1992), and What Remains (2003).

Her recognition by the Center for Photography at Woodstock is described by the gallery for her outstanding lifetime achievements and acclaimed body of work.

“For over 40 years, her lyrical, black-and-white depictions of family and nature have evoked the psychology of loss, the intimacy of young womanhood, and the way Southern landscapes have retained the scars of war.”

Mann has also recently made headlines for having her photos seized by police in Texas, prompting condemnation and outcry from civil rights groups.

The 2025 CPW Vision Award for Photographer of the Year goes to Tyler Mitchell (American, b. 1995). A fashion photographer whose lush, blazing work redefines the genre, Mitchell’s photography is full of colorful land and seascapes reimagined as portraits.

Growing up in Atlanta, Mitchell began documenting the skate, music, fashion, and Youth culture scenes of the city at an early age. He made history in 2018 as the first black photographer to photograph a Vogue cover with his iconic portrait of Beyoncé. As the CPW describes:

“Mitchell is a photographer and filmmaker whose images reflect and celebrate the beauty and intimacies of Black American life, centering Black self-determination in the light of history.”

Mitchell’s work is in collections at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the High Museum of Art, and the National Portrait Gallery, as well as exhibited at Foam Fotografiemuseum in Amsterdam, the International Center of Photography in New York, and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. He is also a 2020 Gordon Parks Foundation Fellow.

The past year has shown his work at a survey exhibition at C/O Berlin, a dual exhibition with Richard Avedon at Paris Photo, and a solo exhibition titled Ghost Images at Gagosian Gallery in New York City (on view through April 5).

The 2025 CPW Vision Award Saltzman Prize Winner is interdisciplinary artist, photo historian, curator, and writer Qiana Mestrich (American, b. 1977). In addition, she works as adjunct faculty in photography and social media at the Fashion Institute of Technology (SUNY). She is lauded by CPW for her autobiographical photography highlighting race and women’s issues:

“Her autobiographical artwork and research engages issues around Black and mixed-race identity, motherhood/mothering, and women’s corporate labor. Her innovative collages restore the role of women of color in the corporate workplace by mixing together imagery of office supplies and furniture with women’s faces.”

She is known for founding an arts initiative that advocates for photographers of color with her blog Dodge & Burn: Decolonizing Photography History. Mestrich went on to write a book based on the blog, Decolonization and Diversity in Contemporary Photography: The Dodge & Burn Interviews. She was awarded the Magnum Foundation Counter Histories grant in 2022 for her @WorkingWOC Instagram archive. The project explores themes on women of color in the corporate workplace.

The CPW explains, “The Saltzman Prize recognizes the extraordinary achievements of an emerging photographer whose recent work has garnered wider visibility and whose distinctive voice contributes fresh perspectives to the ongoing dialogue surrounding photography and visual culture. As the recipient of the Saltzman Prize, Mestrich will receive a $10,000 cash award, the 2025 CPW Vision Award for Emerging Photographer, and a solo exhibition of her work at CPW in 2026.”

For Photobook of the Year, the 2025 CPW Vision Award goes to “I’m So Happy You Are Here,” published by Aperture. The book challenges historical precedents by showcasing the work of women photographers Miyako Ishiuchi, Toyoko Tokiwa, and Rinko Kawauch.

The CPW explains the significance, “This important new publication, I’m So Happy You Are Here (Aperture), presents a challenge to historical precedents and the established canon of Japanese photography by providing a comprehensive overview of the contributions of Japanese women to photography. Editors Pauline Vermare and Lesley A. Martin have compiled a critical framework for understanding the historical and contemporary photography work.”

The book contains 25 detailed portfolios, three illustrated essays, an illustrated bibliography, and a selection of writing by Japanese critics. Of note are the critical writings, many of which were published in translation for the first time, sharing these words with the world.

CPW described, “This book is an indispensable resource for anyone interested in a revisionist history of Japanese photography.”

Image credits: Photographs courtesy Center for Photography at Woodstock, Sally Mann, Tyler Mitchell, Qiana Mestrich, Aperture.