JERUSALEM.- The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, has announced the awarding of its 2014 Shpilman International Prize for Excellence in Photography to American artist and photographer Lisa Oppenheim. Selected from among 160 applicants from 28 countries around the world, Oppenheim was awarded the prize for her outstanding body of existing work and prospective projects. Oppenheim spoke about her work prior to the Shpilman Prize award ceremony that was held at the Museum.

Initiated in 2010, the Shpilman Prize awards $45,000 every two years to artists and scholars with the objective of supporting new photographic practice, projects, and research. The prize is awarded by an independent jury of international experts in the field. The 2014 jury was comprised of:

• Quentin Bajac, Chief Curator of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art, New York

• Monika Faber, Founder and Director, Photoinstitut Bonartes, Vienna

• Ruth E. Iskin, Professor Emeritus of Art History, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

• Galit Eilat, Co-Curator, 2014 São Paulo Art Biennial

• Noam Gal, Noel and Harriette Levine Curator, Department of Photography, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

“We congratulate Lisa Oppenheim on becoming the third recipient of the Shpilman International Prize, whose purpose is to recognize, encourage, and cultivate advancements in the field of photography internationally,” said James S. Snyder, Anne and Jerome Fisher Director of the Museum. “Given its history as one of the first museums worldwide to collect photography as a curatorial medium, the Israel Museum is honored to have this opportunity to encourage the continuation of creative enterprise in the field, and just now through this recognition of Lisa’s internationally recognized work.”

“Lisa’s unique artistic practice, typically treating found photographic materials in a strikingly playful and intelligent way, reflects a profound commitment to the shared potentials of history and art and notably through their interaction,” said Noam Gal, Noel and Harriette Levine Curator of the Museum's Department of Photography. “Her choices of subjects – including the future project she presented in her application, Imprint (Shroud of Turin) – give promise to the perpetuation of this fascinating artistic path.”

Oppenheim’s Lunagramms series, acquired by the Museum in 2014, is currently on view at the Museum as part of its current exhibition, New in the Collection.

Based in New York, Lisa Oppenheim works in experimental photography, and her projects derive directly from original research in the social history of the medium. She revives obsolete techniques and materials, transposing them into a personal engagement with episodes from modern history and creating unusual constellations of past and present, analogue and digital, initial idea and final object. Though her works express the current interest of art photographers in the material and historical aspects of the medium, the role of chance and uncertainty is also strongly felt in them. In her art, the working process is as visibly present as the ultimate outcome.