ONCE UPON A TIME life was pretty straightforward for the emerging photographer. It was a matter of learning the mechanics of the best equipment, accessing that equipment, then trying to sell the service to the limited range of options available. The lucky ones got work in a lucrative fashion and advertising industry, the more reliable souls got staff jobs on the newspaper and magazine circuit; and those that eschewed the pressure and politics became solid local photographers, doing worthy things at weddings and bar mitzvahs. Commercial work that left time for private explorations with the camera and more seriously considered personal imagery. And the idea of ‘establishing’ a ‘reputation’ was still a valid one.
When the first seeds of the digital revolution began to bloom - in the guise of the internet - photographers (along with estate agents, it has to be said) were amongst the first to see the potential. And indeed, the best early websites belonged to photographers, for whom this was a logical development. The days of lugging a heaving portfolio - and the actual cost of making that portfolio - gave way to a simple web address that would intrigue any new contact. Even now, some of the very best websites are those of photographers, or related to the photographic image.
Exactly when this halcyon period for photographers began is hard to say, but it is most certainly over now. That underlying beat of new and exciting imagery has become a tinnitus that is hard to avoid. Those formerly inviting web addresses (URLs) now appear like dangerous confetti, invading every email - where a single click can send the brave or the bored off into uncharted waters - with most unsolicited approaches being sent straight to delete by overly keen spam filters. The fight merely to be seen and heard has thus become a battle royal.
So what is the point of these observations? It is simply to note that there is an upside to the overall picture of disillusion and frustration. The Award competition has emerged from the shadows in a brand new guise. No longer the province of the hopeless amateur, as the record number of quality entries to recent high profile events has illustrated, the major Award circuit has become a legitimate platform for the serious professional and international photographer. In Great Britain, a spate of open competitions have been inaugurated offering a high visibility to both winners and entrants, some supported by judging panels drawn from the great and the internationally famous.
SONY WORLD PHOTOGRAPHY AWARDS
Any event that has the backing of Sony media power is not going to go unnoticed and neither are the glittering array of associates that the WPA project founder, Scott Gray, has arraigned to support the event’s bona fides. The Honorary Board includes luminaries Bruce Davidson, Susan Meiselas, Elliott Erwitt, Mary-Ellen Mark, Martin Parr, Stephen Cohen and Tom Stoddart; supported by an international ‘academy’ of over one hundred eminent players such as Terry O’Neill, the BJP’s Simon Bainbridge, Gered Mankowitz, Jack Reznicki (PPA), Phil Stern, Brett Rogers (PG) and Alan Sparrow (Metro) amongst the many others.
Conceived in Cannes in 2005, the SWPA will culminate in an extravagant, Hollywood-style awards ceremony at the Palais de Festivals on 24th April 2008, where eleven different categories (1) of image making will be showcased, work submitted from both professional and amateur sectors. It is a deliberate game plan to establish the SWAP as an annual ‘Oscars’ for the global photographic community and reflects just how much the photographic image has become the essential art of our time. Combined with a black tie gala dinner, the awards ceremony is sure to become a fixture on the international arts circuit. (2)
The Awards themselves incorporate an exhibition of the finalist’s work at Rotunda Lerins, part of a five day (and evening) programme of events. The professional sector will select three finalists from each category to be nominated for the grand prize of L’iris d’or ($25,000 plus title of SWPA Photographer of the Year). This will be awarded to the single artist whose picture best reflects the ‘image of the year’ - surely the most difficult judging task, given the disparate nature of the eleven categories? In addition, there will be a parallel Cannes exhibition for the finalists in the amateur division. These have entered for eight available categories (excluded are nude, advertising and photojournalism) and will be showcased on the interactive SWPA website, designed to ‘encourage global intercommunication’ amongst snappers everywhere.
Sony have committed to an inaugural three year sponsorship, and have met the challenge with enthusiasm. ‘There aren’t any other photographic awards on the same scale... with its international reach and accessibility to photographers of all abilities’, notes Sony (Europe) executive, Emily Young. Emily has been the driving force in this collaboration and the results are already more than positive for Sony. In the first week alone, the web portal had experienced 2.5 million hits, with 1735 registrations and 1018 submissions (288 professionals and 730 amateur). Shaun Dorrington, General Manager of Digital Still Cameras for Sony (Europe), and responsible for overseeing strategic marketing and business development, is equally up-beat: ‘…as part of our initial three year partnership [Sony] is excited to be playing such a big part in a major new forum for recognising international photographic talent - which perfectly underlines Sony’s determined support of the global digital imaging market’, he says. The evidence so far suggests the SWPA is already on course to be a major annual event in the photography calendar.
NPG NATIONAL PHOTOGRAPHIC PORTRAIT PRIZE
The National Portrait Gallery, just behind London’s Trafalgar Square, announced the winner of its prestigious National Photographic Portrait Prize last November. In its fifth year, the open submission competition was anything but conservative and the £12,000 award went to Jonathan Torgovnik, 38, a former combat photographer in the Israeli army who moved to New York in his early twenties. From 6,900 submissions entered by 2,700 photographers from around the world, the judges (4) selected 60 portraits for the exhibition. The interest in 2007 was demonstrably stronger than ever, with 1,835 more entries than 2006 and with 679 more photographers submitting work.
Torgovnik's first-prize winning photograph was taken as part of the series Intended Consequences: mothers of genocide, children of rape - an ongoing project which documents the lives of Tutsi women raped during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Entitled Joseline Ingabire with her daughter Leah Batamuliza, Rwanda, it shows Joseline embracing her second daughter, while her first daughter, Hossiana, is in the background, standing in front their mud-walled home. Torgovnik has since set up Foundation Rwanda (3) to provide funding for the secondary school education of these children. So far, Torgovnik has raised over $180,000 from publishing prints from the ongoing series (to date a total of 30 portraits). Torgovnik’s photographs have appeared the Sunday Times Magazine, the Telegraph and Paris Match, he is now a contract photographer for Newsweek. All of which ably illustrates the calibre of photographer now engaging with these high profile award competitions.
The NPG also awards three commendation prizes. In 2007, the £3000 Second Prize went to Julieta Sans, born 1979 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, for Lucila am. Sans qualified with a Postgraduate Certificate in Photography from Central St Martins and works in London as a creative researcher in advertising. Third Prize (£2000) went to Michelle Sank for Janine. Born in Capetown, South Africa in 1953, Sank’s portrait was one of a series commissioned for exhibition at Reality Crossings, the 2nd Fotofestival in Mannheim, Germany. And finally, the fourth award of £1000 was given to Lancaster born David Stewart (49) for Alice & Fish (from the series Relations). Stewart worked as assistant to a number of photographers in London before setting up his own commercial studio. There was also a new, special prize for ‘the best portrait taken by a photographer aged 25 or under’. The inaugural £2,500 Godfrey Argent Award went to Irish born Ivor Prickett, for his portrait Slavica Feeds her baby son Nikola while her husband Nebojsa sleeps (from the series The Quiet After the Storm). Prickett’s project has enjoyed much acclaim, also garnering the Ian Parry Scholarship and the BJP/Nikon Endframe Award.
Such is the momentum this competition has achieved that it will be sponsored from 2008 by the European law firm, Taylor Wessing, whose previous collaboration with the NPG includes the 2005 exhibition The World's Most Photographed and their co-sponsorship of Face of Fashion in 2007. The National Portrait Gallery has a long and distinguished involvement with the photographic image and its 2008 programme now includes high end projects, as demonstrated by Vanity Fair Portraits 1913-2008 (5) - rare vintage prints and contemporary classics from the Conde Nast archive; from Steichen and Man Ray to Helmut Newton, Leibovitz and Testino.
The Jerwood Photography Awards
The Jerwood Charitable Foundation has rapidly become one of the most positive and important supports for the Arts in the UK. It is ‘dedicated to responsible and imaginative funding of the visual and performing arts’ and the Jerwood Visual Arts Series also incorporates the Jerwood Contemporary Painters, Jerwood Sculpture Prize, Jerwood Applied Arts and the Jerwood Drawing Prize - as well as the Jerwood Photography Awards, launched in 2003.
In collaboration with Portfolio Magazine, the JPA is directed at talented artists in the early stages of professional life and comprises of three elements: five cash Awards of £2,500; the winners work exhibited in a group show at Jerwood Space (6) in November; and a tour of the exhibition. There is also ancillary coverage in the November issue of Portfolio Magazine. In 2007, over 4,000 images were submitted by 540 entrants, all recent graduates from UK visual art courses and resident in the UK (as required by the rules of competition (7) ). Five winners were selected by jury (8). Martin Barnes (V&A and Chair of the Selection Panel) noted: ‘Current issues were high on the agenda across all submissions, and the winners reflect this trend. It is clear that photographers are probing and commenting boldly upon some of the most prevalent and emotive topics of our time’.
The 2007 winners were: Sophie Gerrard, E-wasteland, 2006, about the growing problems of electronic waste in India. Dana Popa, Not Natasha, 2006, about the damaged lives of young girls and women caught up in human trafficking for prostitution. Moira Lovell, The After School Club, 2006-07, shows young women taken from school-themed nightclubs and returned to their school gates. Kevin Newark, Protoplasm, 2005-06, illustrates the current issues about waste and its global effect. Edmund Kevill-Davies Puppet Love, 2006-07, a humorous series about some of the last remaining practicing ventriloquists in the UK, who are fast being made redundant.
2008 will demonstrate how even established award competitions - like the Photographers’ Gallery Annual Prize (9) - have expanded to respond to the global community. Now sponsored by Deutsche Börse, the Annual Prize rewards a living photographer, of any nationality, who has made the most significant contribution to the medium of photography in Europe between 1 October 2006 - 30 September 2007. The world’s largest exchange organisation and a major sponsor of photographic art, Deutsche Börse owns an extensive collection of contemporary photography, which includes more than 600 works, most of them large-scale, by over 60 international artists. The jury (10) for 2008 selected John Davies, Jacob Holdt, Esko Männikkö and Fazal Sheikh, a shortlist that ‘demonstrates a focused and sustained commitment to exploring subjects of social and political importance through photograph’. These will have international exposure through the exhibition tour to Berlin and Frankfurt.
With sponsors the calibre of Sony, Deutsche Börse, Jerwood and Taylor Wessing, other corporate leaders are sure to follow and the future looks good for those taking photographs with a serious intent. The photographic Award competition has truly ceased to be the ‘end of the pier show’ and has taken its proper place alongside prominent art annuals and other prestigious international arts awards.
N O T E S
Sony World Photography Awards
1) Abstract, Advertising, Architecture, Fashion, Music, Nature, Nude, Portrait, Photojournalism, Science, Sport.
2) Palais des Festivals Cannes 21-25 April 2008
www.worldphotographyawards.org
NPG Photographic Portrait Prize
3) www.foundationrwanda.org
4) Judged from original prints by: Sandy Nairne, Director, NPG (Chair); Cheryl Newman, Commissioning Photography Editor for Saturday Telegraph Magazine; Sheila Rock, Photographer; Sue Steward, Photography critic for the Evening Standard; Terence Pepper, Curator of Photographs, NPG.
5) Vanity Fair Portraits 1913-2008. 14th February - 26th May 2008. sponsored by Burberry
www.npg.org.uk
The Jerwood Photography Awards
6) Annually at the Jerwood Space
171 Union Street, Bankside. London SE1 0LN
9 November – 9 December (2007)
7) Open to artists who work with the medium of photography and are resident in the UK, who have graduated from a visual arts degree course in the UK between January 2004 and September 2007. No age limit. Registration between May and August. Between 6 and 10 photographs are accompanied by an artist’s statement and biography. Selection takes place in September.
8) Martin Barnes, Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Gloria Chalmers, Portfolio Magazine; Gayle Chong Kwan, Artist; John Davies, Photographer; Anne McNeill, Impressions Gallery, Bradford.
www.jerwoodvisualarts.org
Photographers’ Gallery
9) Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2008
5 & 8 Great Newport Street. London WC2H 7HY
8 February - 6 April 2008
10) The Jury: Els Barents, Director, Huis Marseille (The Netherlands), Jem Southam, photographer (UK), Thomas Weski, Chief Curator, Haus der Kunst (Germany) and Anne-Marie Beckmann, Curator, Art Collection Deutsche Börse (Germany). The Chair is Brett Rogers.
www.photonet.org.uk
www.deutsche-boerse.com/art
