(Nancy Floyd: 1984/2013/2020 | Photo courtesy of Nancy Floyd)
Nancy Floyd has been photographing herself since 1982, with the aim of taking a photo a day. The resulting project, comprised of over 2,500 images, is a meditation on the passage of time, loss and the aging female body. Weathering Time is the winner of the inaugural ICP / GOST First Photo Book Award.
The uniform black and white self-portraits in this project record Floyd’s body from head to toe, as well as her environment and sometimes family and friends. If she fails to take a picture, she advances the film in her camera, so a blank image is recorded, creating a visual calendar. For the first 36 years, Floyd used a film camera, and last year she began to shoot with digital. In the book, over 1,200 images are presented in grid format. They are grouped into categories such as Mom, Dad, Shirts with Words, Good Hair, Pets (all) and Evolution of the Typewriter — charting both the constants and the changes in fashion, technology, society and culture as well as the people in Floyd’s life.
‘It’s not just the body that changes: fashions and hairstyles evolve, pets come and go, typewriters, analog clocks and telephones with cords disappear, and finally, film gives way to digital and the computer replaces the darkroom,” said Floyd, a professional artist currently living in Bend. “While Weathering Time is a personal archive, and I am mining the archive to address issues of the female body, the family snapshot and loss, I am also interested in producing images that suggest some of the experiences of my generation. Indeed, the photographs underscore the cultural, technological and physical changes that have occurred over the past 38 years — from my youth to the dawn of my old age.”
The ICP / GOST First Photo Book Award aims to promote and support the work of previously unpublished photographers and artists through the production of a first photo book by the ICP / GOST imprint. The inaugural Award attracted nearly 300 entrants from 45 countries. The call for entries for the ICP / GOST First Photo Book Award 2020 is now open.
Nancy Floyd (born 1956) was raised in Texas. She holds a BFA from the University of Texas at Austin, an MA from Columbia College Chicago, and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. She has been an exhibiting artist for over thirty-five years and is Professor Emerita in the Ernest G. Welch School of Art and Design at Georgia State University in Atlanta. The series ‘Weathering Time’ has been exhibited at Blue Sky Gallery, Portland, OR, CUE Art Foundation, New York, NY; Whitespace, Atlanta, GA; and Flux Projects, Atlanta. Her work has been included in exhibitions at Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Atlanta; Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid, Spain; the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center; and the California Museum of Photography, Riverside, CA amongst others, and is held in the collections of the Center for Creative Photography, High Museum of Art and Lightwork.
She was the recipient of a 2018 Aaron Siskind Photography Fellowship, a 2016 CUE Art Foundation Fellowship, a 2015 Society for Photographic Education Future Focus Project Support Grant, and a 2014 John Gutmann Photography Fellowship Award.
The book is available for pre-sale here.