WINCHESTER WOMAN receives competitive Illinois Arts Council grant for photography project

By Editor | September 16, 2025 |

By DAVID CAMPHOUSE

Winchester photographer Lucy Reid learned last week that a long-planned photography project of hers will receive financial support from the Illinois Arts Council.
Reid’s project – which will photographically document the places and people of Winchester – was selected for support through the Illinois Arts Council Creative Project’s Grant program. Reid will receive a $12,000 grant to accomplish the goals of her photography project.
Earlier this year, Reid opened the Diana art gallery and book shop on the north side of Winchester’s square. Reid indicated that part of her rationale for opening the gallery and retail space was to give her a location to house her ongoing effort to document life and history in Scott County – known as the Winco Project.
The recently announced grant project is directly tied to Reid’s ongoing Winco Project, which she described in her recently awarded grant proposal.
“I have been photographing Scott County for a majority of my life,” Reid wrote in the grant proposal. “I have focused on landscapes and street photography. I am working on a large research project about the culture and history of the community, and I am working on writing a book about the area.”
The selection process for funding of Illinois Arts Council Creative Project’s Grant projects is competitive, and the award notice affirmed the funder’s belief in the importance of Reid’s project.
“Please know the funding decisions are based on the evaluation criteria published in the application guidelines,” Reid’s award notice read. “Annually, the total support requested by Illinois artists and arts organizations substantially exceeds the funds available from the General Assembly of the State of Illinois and the National Endowment for the Arts for distribution from the council.”
Reid’s project – according to the proposal she submitted to the Illinois Arts Council – will be composed of hundreds of photographs she takes of Winchester’s residents over the next several months.
“This project will take place over eight months, where I will take 500-1000 studio and candid portraits, street photographs of Winchester, Illinois,” Reid wrote in her grant proposal. “…select images will be on display at the Diana, in Winchester, Illinois. Some of the subjects I want to include are Women in Agriculture, The Margins, Youth, The Agrarian Imperative, Legacy Families and Farms, Community, Winchester at Night.”
Reid indicated that the Illinois Arts Council project – and the larger Winco Project – are part of an effort to better understand Scott County and herself.
“In a lot of ways, working on this project has just been me looking for something to love about this place,” Reid said. “Living here hasn’t always been easy – like many people, I have complex feelings about where I come from. I think that can be even more complicated when you come from a very small community.”
Reid said that her own trajectory as a photographer and an artist were strongly influenced by the work of Sally Mann. Mann is an American photographer known for black and white photographs of people and places in her immediate surroundings – including her immediate family and rural landscapes.
“The first time I realized that photography was art, was watching Art 21 on PBS, there was a piece about Sally Mann,” Reid said. “It was about her immediate family series, and how she was so committed to making these really compelling, interesting and sometimes controversial images out of everyday life.”
“At some point I decided that I had to do the same thing if I was going to stay here and also be happy. I would have to find a way to do the work that I Ioved, even if it only made sense to me at the time. And in the process, I did find a lot of things to love about this place.”
Reid sees the Illinois Art Council funded project as a logical next step for her voluminous body of work documenting Scott County.
“I am at the point that I had to start thinking about how to finish this body of work, so that I could move on to the next one,” Reid said. “I have taken almost a hundred thousand photographs of Scott County so far. I felt like it was a meaningful way to finish it, by taking 100 portraits of people from here.”
“The portraits worth taking usually require some level of trust or intimacy between the subject and the photographer, that in itself takes time and intention. For myself, I hope that means I get to make 100 meaningful connections with this community. For the community, I hope this adds to the dynamic story of who we are.”
Reid expressed gratitude for the Arts Council funding. The funding, Reid said, will allow her to complete her project of taking hundreds of portraits and other photos of Winchester, but the funding will also allow Reid to print and show her work – making the work more immediate and accessible. To date, much of Reid’s work documenting Scott County relies on cloud storage and social media.
“The funding from the grant not only lets me set aside the time to do this work, but also provides for me to print and exhibit it, so my portfolio won’t die in my Google Drive,” Reid said.
For more information on Reid’s work, visit the Winco Project at https://www.facebook.com/thewincoproject or the Diana at http://www.dianaonmarket.com/.