A photographer who teaches at Michigan State University recently earned a huge honor: a Guggenheim Fellowship.
These fellowships support artists in pursuit of scholarship in any field of knowledge, with few restrictions.
After ten years working as a photojournalist, Lara Shipley went back to school for a Master of Fine Arts degree in photography.
Now an associate professor in the MSU Department of Art, Art History and Design, she says she’s still telling stories, especially non-fiction ones.
"I’m very inspired and fascinated by the world, and everything that I am making is really coming out of that curiosity of how things ended up the way they are, is something comes up a lot in my work.”
Shipley’s projects are no longer purely documentary in nature, and putting together a photo story can take a long time. For her, it’s important to give the process the time it needs.
“I am looking at making the images match the story.” she said. “So for instance, I have a project about a charlatan scammer, medical fraud from the 1920s in the Ozarks, and he was all about the art of illusion, and so the photographs represent that. It wouldn’t make sense for them to be straight forward.”
This particular project reminds her of modern-day medical charlatans. It will be published as a book this summer and will also be part of an exhibition in Copenhagen, Denmark.
To win a Guggenheim Fellowship, an artist proposes a project they need time, resources and financial support for. Once chosen, they’re given great creative freedom over what to do with the money they receive from the program.