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A Sense of Place

"A Sense of Place" delves into how environments shape experiences and emotions. Whether it's a bustling cityscape, a serene natural vista, or an intimate, personal corner, we were looking for images that convey the unique character and atmosphere of a place. Selected photographs should evoke a sense of connection, memory, or identity related to the locations captured. We were seeking a series of images that tell a story. 

Photo: Charles Muir Lovell

Our Jurors

 Alex Harris has photographed extensively in the American South, New Mexico, Alaska and Cuba. He is one of the founders of the Center for Documentary Studies and of Doubletake Magazine. Harris is an emeritus professor at Duke where has taught for four decades through the Sanford School, The Center for Documentary Studies, and the MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts. His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography, a Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellowship, a Lyndhurst Prize, and the Robert Cox Undergraduate Teaching Award at Duke. As a photographer and editor, Harris has published 20 books including River of Traps, a 1991 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in general non-fiction.  Other books include The Idea of Cuba (2007), Why We are Here with evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson (2012) and Our Strange New Land: Narrative Movie Sets in the American South with Margaret Sartor (2021).

Margaret Sartor is a writer, curator, and visual artist who lives in Durham, NC. Her books include Where We Find Ourselves: The Photographs of Hugh Mangum 1897–1922 (with Alex Harris), What Was True: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney (with Geoff Dyer), and the New York Times best-selling memoir Miss American Pie: A Diary of Love, Secrets, and Growing Up in the 1970s. Sartor’s photographs and essays have appeared in numerous books and publications, among them The Paris Review, Aperture, The New Yorker, and, most recently, Visible Spectrum: Portraits from the World of Autism by Mary Berridge. Her photographs are in permanent collections including: Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans Museum of Art, and North Carolina Museum of Art. As a curator, Sartor has worked with, among others, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, International Center for Photography in New York, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.