Avion Pearce: 2024 Aperture Portfolio Prize Winner

Overview

Merging analog techniques with political purpose and a poetic sensibility, Avion Pearce, winner of the 2024 Aperture Portfolio Prize, creates a visual world that lives between reality and dreams. Born in Flatbush, Brooklyn, to Guyanese parents, Pearce has been interested since childhood in beauty and the cultivation of a space. They were inspired by Abelardo Morell’s use of the camera obscura technique, and the photography of Ming Smith, Roy DeCarava, and Graciela Iturbide, who each innovated with light, motion, and ambiance. Pearce’s series In the Hours Between Dawn inhabits multiple registers and explores photography’s potential to chart the interplay between time and the body, in particular the experience of queer and trans communities of color. Survival, in their work, is about being both soft and strong.

Avion Pearce studied photography at Parsons the New School of Design and is currently an MFA candidate for photography at the Yale School of Art. They received a BFA Photography Scholarship at Parsons, and they are a NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship recipient. Their work has been shown at Ryan Lee Gallery, Aperture, and Hudson Opera House; and has been featured in New York magazine’s The Cut, W, Crack, Netflix, and the New York Times.

The Aperture Portfolio Prize aims to spotlight new talent in photography, identifying contemporary trends in the field and highlighting artists whose work deserves greater recognition. Pearce’s work, chosen from an outstanding number of submissions, is published with an essay by Lucy McKeon in the Summer 2024 issue of Aperture magazine.

Image: Avion Pearce, Van, Shirley Chisholm Park, 2022; from the series In the Hours Between Dawn