162 - Naomi Harris
© Naomi Harris
Naomi Harris is a Canadian photographer and artist who seeks out interesting cultural trends to document through her subjects. Personal projects include Haddon Hall in which she photographed the last remaining elderly residents of a hotel in South Beach, Miami, Florida. For this work she received the 2001 International Prize for Young Photojournalism from Agfa/Das Bildforum, an honorable mention for the Yann Geffroy Award, and was a W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography finalist. Twenty years later the work is about to be jointly published in a book, also entitled Haddon Hall, by MAS and Void.
For her next project America Swings, Naomi documented the phenomenon of swinging over the course of 5 years (from 2003 to 2008) all over the United States, attending thirty eight swingers parties in the process. This project was realized in her first monograph released by Taschen in 2008 as a limited collectors edition. A trade edition was released in 2010. Artist Richard Prince interviewed Naomi for the book, which was edited by Dian Hanson.
Naomi then completed EUSA, a reaction to the homogenization of European and American cultures through globalization for which she visited and photographed American-themed amusement parks in Europe and European themed towns in America. The project was shortlisted for the Luma Rencontres Dummy Book Award in 2016 and ultimately published as a book by Kehrer Books in 2018.
Other accolades include being awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Photography in 2013, a Long-Term Career Advancement Grant from the Canada Council in 2012 and participating in the World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass in 2004.
For her most recent project, I Voyager, Naomi embarked on a 70-day canoe trip along the fur trader’s route in Ontario, Canada, accompanied by a guide and dressed in 19th century period costume inspired by the British painter Frances Anne Hopkins (1838 – 1919). The project includes self-portraiture and landscape photography and forms part of a much wider investigation into feminism, exploring the concepts of power, identity and sexuality.
Naomi currently divides her time between Toronto and the USA where she is studying for an MFA in Studio Art at the graduate school of the University of Buffalo in New York state.
On episode 162, Naomi discusses, among other things:
Thoughts on social media
Doing an MFA in Studio Arts and taking her practice in a new direction
Facing the double whammy of gender disparity and ageism
Having a cloud over her head like Charlie Brown
Her latest project, I Voyager.
New book Haddon Hall
EUSA and the thorny topic of cultural appropriation
Exploring the theme of death
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