In 2021, Google introduced the Creator Labs Photo Fund, an initiative designed to support emerging photographers during key moments in their careers. This year, in partnership with Aperture, the fund awarded 30 artists each a $6,000 grant, and a Google Pixel device to help them produce new work. In celebration of their talent and artistic achievements, W magazine invited 13 of this year’s grant recipients to showcase their work and share insights into their creative process below.
“Adelante” is an ongoing photographic project by Steven Molina Contreras, featuring work captured in El Salvador and New York. The project documents the photographer’s life and his relatives’ efforts to stay connected despite living in different countries, creating a poignant statement about migration, borders, and belonging. Through physical prints, exhibitions, and image sequences, Molina Contreras provides an interpersonal perspective on a family living at both ends of the immigration spectrum.
“This body of work is titled ‘I’m so glad you’re here,’ in which photography is used to tether time together, utilizing different ways of photographic seeing, in a ‘here’ that carries the weight of other ways of knowing, and a time that evokes other ways of being,” Osorio tells W. “I love images that have implications of withholding oneself, creating a tension between subject and viewer born from anticipation of the figures’ reciprocation. I think one of the biggest successes of this work is the way I can use time as a construct and how it can be both linear and fragmented; stretched so far thin that you cannot tell what is beginning or ending. The images are paired together in a temporal space, and I always use a central surrogate Black femme figure as the anchor of this work.”
“‘When We Return Home’ is a photographic project based on ephemeral objects, images, and records from my Japanese American family during WWII, and the post-war era detailing their removal and internment in an American relocation camp and their post-war reintegration search for a fulfilling, vibrant life,” says Sakai. “These familial fragments, intermixed with my own photographs, speak to my connection with their loss, lineage, and ultimately hopeful future.”
“‘Humble’ presents a visual account of Bed-Stuy’s Humble School of Martial Arts as a crucial community pillar amid the rapid and significant changes in Brooklyn neighborhoods,” says Ruiz González. “The effects of the pandemic, gentrification, rising rents, and displacement have meant the school had to vacate its longtime home this past year. Conceived as a research project on how communities strive to preserve their cultural identity amid urban development pressures, the series—created with a 4x5 field camera—illustrates how fast-paced development is eroding cultural and community foundations, while community members dedicate themselves to preserving their traditions and roots.”
“Having lived away from home and family for over a decade, I began to evaluate the role of tradition in my own life,” Nguyen tells W. “Once you take a tradition outside its original context, it becomes inherently open to interpretation. The Kitchen God Series uses the landscape of mythology to explore the confines of identity through the exchange of reality and fiction, of shared beliefs and personal history.”
“I grew up distant from my cultural heritage, not speaking Spanish at home and never visiting the place where my father was born,” Perez explains. “This work aims to re-establish the link that was lost through the emigration of my family from the Dominican Republic to the United States.”
“‘We’re Just Here for the Bad Guys’ started as a collaboration project proposed by my late father as a means of mending our fractured relationship after a decade of being separated,” says Van Lau. “I spent my last week with him in Vietnam to make said pictures amid his brain cancer diagnosis and treatments. After his passing, I didn’t see the meaning in it. I felt that we failed each other, and very selfishly speaking, how do you continue making work about a subject after that? As I uncovered more about our relationship through hidden letters, albums, and court documents, the secrets began to spill out, and the story was unfolding in a new way, something allegorical as well as biographical.”
“Through faded memories, I reconstruct remnants of my native land,” Mujanayi says. “I investigate my identity as a queer immigrant and address the complexities of what it means to take up an American identity.”
“Under the glow of the moon, the boundaries between people, animals, and the land soften and blur,” says Guilmoth. “‘Flowers Drink the River’ is an animistic search for beauty, resistance, safety, and magic in a world often devoid of these things. It’s a love note to rural working-class people, trans women, lesbians, queer people, and my home in the backwoods of central Maine.”
“‘Venas Abiertas,’ the title for this work, is based on Eduardo Galeano’s seminal book, ‘The Open Veins of Latin America,’ about U.S. imperialism in Latin America and its history of extraction,” says Mozman Solano. “The photographs give voice to economic and political policy toward Latinx people, the region, and its consequence, which has resulted in waves of immigration to the U.S. The story of my family’s migration from Panamá to the American south in the late 1960s due to economic need shaped my understanding of this multifaceted history. The victory is in giving voice to this important and complex history of U.S. policy toward Central America, Mexico, and the border, as well as Latinos’s living within the U.S., which too few people really know about.”
“‘వెళ్ళొస్తా (vellostha)’ is a photographic project on how my queerness and gender expression disrupts, informs, and reforms my identity every time I visit my home in South India,” Kag says. “On every journey home, I experience a cycle of gender dysphoria and euphoria. Photographing these patterns while finding the language for these experiences was incredibly difficult, and it was often unclear how this project would play out. And so, receiving external validation and support for it feels like a reassuring, warm hug, telling me: ‘It’s okay, we are just here for the ride.’”
“‘Jāḷī– Meshes of Resistance’ is an ongoing project that weaves together the lives of women in India who are often hidden from view, made visible to the world on their own terms,” Malik says. “Traveling to a number of states across India, which remains plagued by endemic gendered violence, I met domestic abuse survivors and collaborated with them through photography and embroidery. They reclaim their narratives by embroidering their stories onto their portraits, transforming their likenesses into powerful symbols of resilience and self-expression, enmeshing themselves in a stronger fabric of resistance.”
“The name of the project, ‘Hibakujumoku,’ refers to a Japanese word describing trees that survived the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” Matsuda explains. “Many members of my family did not survive this event, so I have been interested in photographing the ecological life of Hiroshima—these survivor trees, the animals, the rivers—because I am searching for a tangible and living connection to the city.”
