Pulitzer Center Update

Grantee Louie Palu Receives the 2019 Arnold Newman Prize for New Directions in Photographic Portraiture

September 03, 2019 | Awards
By
Fernanda Pérez
Louie Palu's work photographs the Inuit communities of the high Artic before freezing them into large blocks of ice to portray the connection between their environment and their identity.

Louie Palu's work photographs the Inuit communities of the high Artic before freezing them into large blocks of ice to portray the connection between their environment and their identity. 

Pulitzer Center grantee Louie Palu was honored by Maine Media Workshops as the recipient of the 2019 Arnold Newman Prize For New Directions in Photographic Portraiture.   

For the winning project, Palu froze large photographs of Inuit community members into ice blocks before displaying them, aiming to illustrate the change felt by these natives groups as their home receives the blunt of climate change. "I felt the need to push the boundaries of traditional portraiture to not only looking and at encountering another person through photography, but experiencing what they are seeing." In his photography series "Artic Passage," Palu captures the implications a melting Artic has on the people whose identity is rooted in the region.

"Artic Passage" has been previously displayed at the South by Southwest Conference in Austin, Texas and was featured on PBS Newshour. Palu's other work is held in numerous collections including the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and many more.

As a winner of the Prize for New Directions in Photographis Portraiture, Palu received a $20,000 cash prize and his work will be exhibited at the Griffin Museum of Photography along with the photography of the other three finalists. For a list of all the winners since the award was founded please visit the Arnold Newman Prize website.