The annual Sony World Photography
Awards competition has, from relatively recent and humble beginnings, rapidly
morphed into the largest international photography competition, attracting
almost 70,000 entries from 166 countries in 2014. The professional competition
was of particular interest to me, because it required photographers to submit
up to ten images in one of 14 categories, as a series that consistently and
compellingly told a visual story. The parallels with my major project
assignment are obvious and I was interested to see how the professional
photographers used their sets of photographs to tell the stories.
Additional to
this competition were the open competition (single images, 14 categories as
above) and various other competitions aimed at encouraging young photographers.
The exhibition also featured the work of American photographer Mary Ellen Mark,
who had been awarded the Sony “Outstanding Contribution to Photography” award
for 2014, and recent work by octogenarian master photographer William Klein,
whose work I reviewed recently following a visit to Tate Modern to see the
Klein / Moriyama retrospective.
The exhibition took place in both the
East and West wings of Somerset House and took well over two hours to cover.
For this review I will concentrate on the work of a handful of the winners in
the professional category.
Sara Naomi Lewkowicz (“L’Iris d’Or” and First Place: “Contemporary
Issues”)
“L’Iris d’Or” is the highest
accolade to be handed out in this competition and is given to the photographer
whose work represents “the pinnacle of the entries received”. The winner is
chosen from within the first place winners of all the professional categories.
Lewkowicz’s photographs shine a light on domestic violence in the USA, a crime
that usually happens “behind closed doors”.
This series of photographs, which
concentrates on the relationship between Shane and Maggie and Maggie’s two
young children by her estranged husband, raises many questions about
documentary photography and about story-telling in general. The photographer
has been pilloried in the media and on the internet for not intervening to
prevent the aggression that occurred whilst she was shooting, although the
police had been called out when her photographs of domestic violence were
taken. The camera captures not just the incident of abuse but also the earlier
building up of the relationships between Shane, Maggie and her two children, as
well as the aftermath as Shane is arrested by the police (he later received a
9-month custodial sentence) and Maggie tries to build a new life in Alaska,
with the father of her children.
This work is clearly of
importance in that it opens a door onto domestic violence that has not
previously been portrayed as it happens. The fact that Shane was convicted of
assault proves that the violence was not acted out for the cameras, but I do
wonder why Shane allowed himself to be filmed and how Lewkovicz could record
the growing relationships between Shane, Maggie and the children, apparently
with the consent of all concerned. The power of the story overcomes any lack of
quality in the individual images (although there are some atmospheric,
well-composed shots here) but one has to ask whether, if events had turned out
differently, Lewkowicz would have had a visual story to tell at all.
Sophie Gamand (First Place: “Portraiture”)
At the opposite end of the
emotional scale Gamand’s series of portraits of dogs, caught mid-bath and
shortly before they shook the water off their fur (e.g. see below), caused
amusement and pleasure amongst onlookers and, apparently, the judges.
Image: Sophie Gamand
For me, these photographs are an
example of a beautifully simple concept, well realised. Gamand captures a
series of “decisive moments” during the bathing process, with the dogs
displaying human qualities of annoyance, misery and discomfort that we can all
relate to. There is no requirement to change the set-up or location; all the
dogs sit in front of the same screen. This is a fine example of how one clever
idea can produce a lively and enjoyable photographic story.
Dan Kitwood (Third Place: “Current Affairs”)
Kitwood’s photographs tell the
story of the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan, which swept across the Philippines in
November 2013, killing thousands of people and displacing up to a million
others. His images chronicle the devastation left in the wake of the storm.
The bright colours and shapes of
the boats and densely-packed dwellings, sometimes photographed from the air,
bring a kind of abstract beauty to the horrors of the devastation, reminding me
of the work of Daniel Beltra (subject of my critical essay). Did the beauty of
the devastation make us more inclined to donate to the Philippines’ appeal at
the time or did we just admire the pictures? The aerial shots, in particular,
provide a visual record of the destruction that may have been useful for the
subsequent relief effort: do these photographs have any other value? The same
questions can be asked about images documenting both natural disasters and the
horrors of war.
Hao Li (Second Place: “Conceptual)
Hao Li (a Taiwanese photographer)
stood in the same place, at the same time of day, and framed a single
photograph in exactly the same way every day in order to produce multiple
exposure photographs.
Other photographers have tried to
do the same type of thing before, but Li’s careful choice of scene and framing
produces some wonderful abstract effects that seem to heighten the atmosphere
of the (just) recognisable places that he visits. Li exposed onto film, but it
is possible to produce similar effects by blending multiple digital images: I
must have a go some time!
Other Entries
The exhibition featured a rich
array of concepts and ideas, together with some compelling documentary
photography. I particularly liked Tony Hertz’s series of high shutter speed
close-ups of small ocean waves breaking onto the shore (third place: “nature
and wildlife”) and Kacper Kowalski’s images of the Polish landscape, taken from
the air and looking directly down upon snowy scenes (often minimally) populated
by people or man-made objects (second place: “landscape”). Whilst the photographs
did not always appear to be as strong, visually, as the stories behind them it
should be stressed that usually only two or three from each set of photographs
were exhibited, so the full story could sometimes not be told at the
exhibition.
Whilst the exhibition has not
been reviewed in depth by journalists in the same way that an individual
artist’s work would have been, there has been much criticism on the internet
about the quality of some of the winning entries in the professional
competition. In some cases this has been due to the work not being considered
as part of a series. However, it does raise the question of how to produce a
series of photographic images that both tell a story and have photographic
quality in their own right. This is the question that I have to answer for my
own major project work.
Learning Points,
Future Work and References:
This exhibition provides several
examples of a portfolio of images that tells a story, told by a professional
photographer. It has been and will continue to be of value in providing me with
hints and clues as to how to compose and execute my own major project story
board. I purchased the book of the exhibition, which I will obviously study,
whilst images from the portfolio that are not found in the book and/or were not
featured in the exhibition will be studied on the internet (see second ref.
below).
Link to professional winners’
full portfolios: http://worldphoto.org/about-the-sony-world-photography-awards/pro/
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