Learn how to fund your own photography book with Kickstarter, and get inspiration from photographers who successfully got their projects off the ground!
Presenters: Nancy Borowick Jake Naughton Sara Terry Jason Koxvold
Location: Brooklyn Bridge Park – Emily Warren Roebling Plaza
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Have a photography book in mind, but don’t know how to fundraise or work with publishers? Running a Kickstarter campaign could help galvanize and grow your audience—and fund the first run of your book.
Hear from Kickstarter’s Thought Leader Nancy Borowick, and a group of photographers and publishers, on how they got their projects off the ground. Then get individual support for your own photography book project, to take it to the next step.
Nancy Borowick (b. 1985) is a humanitarian photographer currently based on the island of Guam. She is a graduate of the Documentary Photography and Photojournalism program at the International Center of Photography and holds a degree in Anthropology and Photography from Union College.
Over the last 10 years, Nancy has narrowed the focus of her work, telling stories of illness and personal relationships using compassion, humility, and trust as tools to connect with and explore the lives of her subjects. Nancy’s most recent focus has been her parents’ battles with cancer.
She is a regular contributor to the New York Times and has also been featured in the International Herald Tribune, The New York Times Lens Blog, CNN, National Geographic, PROOF, Time Magazine, Photo District News, The Washington Post, Stern Magazine, and Newsweek Japan. In February of 2016, she was awarded second prize in the Long Term Projects category in World Press Photo and was recently awarded the Arnold Newman Prize in New Directions in Photographic Portraiture, the Eddie Adams Workshop Award in Innovation in Visual Storytelling, and Honorable Mention in the NPPA Best of Photojournalism competition in the Contemporary Issues Story category. In 2014, Nancy was named one the Best of ASMP featured photographers as well as one of Lens Culture’s Top 50 Emerging Talents.
Her “Cancer Family, Ongoing” project was presented at the Visa Pour l’Image in Perpignan, France in 2014 and was exhibited at the festival in the following year. Her work has also been exhibited at the Look 3 Photography Festival in the USA, the Obscura Photo Festival in Malaysia, the Angkor Photography Festival in Cambodia, the Guate photo Festival in Guatemala, the Oberstdorfer Fotogipfel Photo festival in Germany, and the International Photo Festival Leiden in Holland. In 2016, Nancy presented at the Norrlandsdagarna Photo Festival in Sweden and the work was also exhibited at the Lumix Festival for Young Photojournalism in Germany. “Cancer Family, Ongoing” was recently exhibited in Spain at the Xavier Miserach Biennial as well as at over 100 locations around the world as part of the World Press Photo winners show. In 2017, the work will continue to be exhibited in locations in the US and in Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Italy and France.
In the spring of 2016, Borowick raised $65,313 USD with the help of 740 backers through a Kickstarter campaign, created to fund the development of her upcoming book, “The Family Imprint,” based on “Cancer Family, Ongoing” and available for purchase in 2017.
Jake Naughton When We Were Strangers 278 Backers, $25,047 Raised
Jake Naughton is a Mexico City-based visual artist and journalist making work about queer identity in the present moment.
This takes the form of long-term, in-depth projects like This is How the Heart Beats, about East Africa’s LGBTQ community, Both Sides of the Veil, which showcases a strange limbo for India’s queer community, or When We Were Strangers, which explores and deconstructs love through the prism of his own relationship with his partner.
Alongside his artistic practice, he makes commissioned work for editorial and commercial clients like Airbnb, The New York Times, WIRED Magazine, Instagram, and more.
Sara Terry is a documentary photographer and filmmaker whose work focuses on how we define our humanity – and the role of community in helping us make that definition. She is a Guggenheim Fellow in Photography, a Contributing Photographer to the VII Foundation and a Sundance Documentary Fellow. Her early photography work, covering post-conflict Bosnia (“Aftermath: Bosnia’s Long Road to Peace”) led her to create The Aftermath Project, a grant-making photography non-profit based on the idea that “War is only half the story.” The Aftermath Project has been giving grants to photographers working in post-conflict settings around the world since 2007.
Jason Koxvold is an artist and photographer based between Brooklyn and upstate New York. He runs Gnomic Book which prints books by photographic artists.
His work has been in WIRED, Financial Times Magazine, Esquire, Wallpaper*, Newsweek Japan, National Geographic Traveler, Slate, and more. He has had solo exhibitions at the Corner Store Gallery, Sydney, NSW, and Gnomic Book, New York City.
Kickstarter helps artists, musicians, filmmakers, designers, and other creators find the resources and support they need to make their ideas a reality. To date, tens of thousands of creative projects—big and small—have come to life with the support of the Kickstarter community.
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