Carl Socolow '77, a Camp Hill, Pa., photographer, has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2006.
Guggenheim Fellows are appointed for distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment. This year's winners include 187 artists, scholars, and scientists selected from almost 3,000 applicants for awards totaling $7,500,000. Decisions are based on recommendations from hundreds of expert advisers.
For the award Socolow submitted a portfolio of black and white photos taken since 2003 in Mata Ortiz, Mexico , a village known for its distinctive clay pottery. The fellowship will provide time and funding for him to further depict village life and to prepare a book of photographs. He has been to the remote Mexican village, 11 times and counting.
A professional photographer doing work for Hershey Entertainment and Resort Company, Holy Spirit Hospital and other businesses and institutions for two decades, Socolow has been doing street photography as a personal project since the late 1990s.
While the work of the great street photographers inspires him, so do imagist poets like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, plus the detail-driven Marcel Proust, and Charles Dickens with his strong character development. It's not surprising for a Dickinson English major.
Along with some commercial workshops, the only formal photographic training Socolow has had are two courses at Dickinson. He came to the college from the East Shore of Harrisburg, having fallen in love with photography at age 15, when he visited a friend's darkroom. "The first time you see a photo come up in the developer it's magical. It snags you," he says.
For a year after graduation he worked in Carlisle in a hardware store to get in touch with everyday life, then as a reporter-photographer at a weekly Perry County, Pa., newspaper. He worked for the Patriot-News in Harrisburg before founding Socolow Photography in 1984.
Scores of Nobel, Pulitzer and other prize-winners have been Guggenheim Fellows, including Ansel Adams, Aaron Copland, Martha Graham, Langston Hughes, Henry Kissinger, Vladimir Nabokov, Linus Pauling, Philip Roth, Wendy Wasserstein, Derek Walcott, James Watson and Eudora Welty.
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