May Pang

Pang's standing rests on something awards bodies do not measure. She kept a photographic record of Lennon during a stretch when almost nobody outside his inner circle was paying that kind of attention, and she kept it for fifty years. The result is a visual archive of 1973 to 1975 that galleries now treat as historical material, exhibited from Missoula to Santa Barbara in 2026. Her memoir Loving John has served biographers as a primary source for four decades. She has no trophies, and she has something rarer: she was there, and she can prove it.