Belinda McKeon is an Irish-born and Brooklyn based writer whose second novel Tender is out now on Picador is published in the US by Lee Boudreaux in February 2016. Her essays and journalism have appeared in the New York Times, Guardian and Paris Review.

Work by Belinda McKeon:

Belinda McKeon nominated photographer Liz Nielsen

"Liz Nielsen is a photographer who does not use a camera. What she creates are photographs; they are portraits of unique moments in time – but it’s as though they are portraits of the feel of those moments, the molecules of those moments as they came into being. Jagged and raw and unabashedly vulnerable, her pieces are vivid shouts of shape and colour, her interpretation of the photogram technique, in which she uses transparent colour gels to make negatives, and lets light leak in to expose the image, which is always different, always strange.

In truth, though I’ve attempted to describe, here, how Liz makes her photographs, I actually can’t understand it, conceive of it; my brain won’t work that way, to think of negatives, dipped in colour, and what the random or deliberate creeping-in of light will do to them. I only understand the beauty and the starkness of the pieces which result, and I love that they look like scenes imagined but are actually scenes happened upon, or made to happen, attempted in the moment before they become visible, attempted in a moment of pure chance and hope and risk. The light will find a way: that’s the belief at the core of Liz’s work. I like that. I like having that kind of work near to me."  

Work by Liz Nielsen: