2025 Collection Award
Download the press release here
The Archive of Documentary Arts at Duke University’s Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library is pleased to announce the recipient of its annual Collection Award. Since 2015, the award has recognized excellence in documentary film, photography, and audio, with a cash honorarium and the chance to have a body of work archivally preserved at Duke.
This year’s winning project, To Be at War is by Korean American photographer Arin Yoon.
Arin Yoon’s project starts with two wide-reaching questions, “What does it mean to be at war?” and “What is he cost of war?” In place of numbers and statistics, however, is Yoon’s intimate first-person narrative.
“From those first moments on a remote military base in the California high desert to coping with the rippling effects of trauma at the end of my spouse's career, my work is a document, over time, of the American military experience,” she writes.
“Thirteen years ago, I married a service member,” Yoon continues. “I have lived the moments leading up to war and the aftermath firsthand. To understand my new life as a military spouse living on a military base, I began photographing my new community, exploring my role in the military structure. These photographs soon evolved into a documentary project about how military families live, including my own experiences as a spouse and mom.”
“This is an incredibly powerful portrait of an intimate side of war," Rebecca Stein, professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University said of Yoon’s portfolio, making it an “unexpected military portrait.”
Arin Yoon is a Korean American photographer and storyteller based in Kansas City. She is also a National Geographic Explorer. Her work focuses on the impacts of war, notions of family, women and issues around identity and representation. Her personal work has been featured in National Geographic, The Washington Post, NPR, CNN and The New York Times.
Over the next several months the Archive of Documentary Arts will work with Yoon to develop a collection that includes finished works such as photographs and videos, but also supplemental research materials. The winner of the Archive of Documentary Arts Collection Awards receives an honorarium of $3,500. The Rubenstein Library has a strong commitment to documentary arts through collecting, preserving, and making available works by a diverse group of creators from around the world.
