For more than 15 years the Black List, founded by Vanity Fair contributor Franklin Leonard, has featured the most-loved unproduced screenplays in Hollywood, and put spotlights on future hits like The King’s Speech, Juno, Looper, and many more. But can the Black List model of encouraging up-and-coming talent be recreated outside of Hollywood?
The inaugural Silver List is ready to find out. Launched this year by the Silver Eye Center for Photography, in partnership with Carnegie Mellon University and the Black List, the Silver List features 47 extraordinary photographers, selected by 500 nonprofit photography curators, educators, scholars, publishers, and critics. The criteria were simple, but deeply personal for each respondent: who is a living, early-career photographer whose work deserves to be seen by more people?
“We thought it would be, if nothing else, interesting to see how people approached the question,” said David Oresick, Silver Eye’s executive director. “It wasn’t until I started to see how people were completing their surveys that I understood that this project was really meaningful for people. People are dealing with an endless feeling pandemic, reckoning with systemic racial injustice, struggling with reduced budgets, layoffs, and furloughs, and really thinking about what all this means for our field. I think many of the artists on the Silver List reflect how curators and scholars are processing this moment.”