RECEIVE
A SOLO EXHIBITION
In addition to the monthly themed competitions we’ve shaped an annual series award for photographers who would like to submit a body of work… Any topic, any genre, any format.
WIN A PRESTIGIOUS EXHIBITION IN BLOOMINGTON
This year, the winner will receive their own fully funded exhibition at Pictura Gallery in Bloomington, IN, in the United States. Originally established in 2008, the vision for the gallery expanded quickly, and it is now hosted within the FAR Center for Contemporary Art – a multi-media space in the creative neighborhood of the city, its beautiful architecture protected under the National Register of Historic Places. The gallery’s mission is to bring together photographers and artists, providing thought-provoking exhibitions for the city, while contributing to the international dialogue on contemporary photography.
The Series Award will be judged by Lisa Woodward and Mia Dalglish, co-curators at Pictura Gallery. For 13 years they have served together as jurors, as guest critics for university classrooms, and as portfolio reviewers for international conferences and festivals such as Fotofest, Photolucida, Filter Photo and Les Rencontres d’Arles. Mia is an alumna of the Indiana University Photography Program, and upon graduation she worked at the International Center for Photography (ICP) in New York. Lisa is an alumna of the Rhode Island School of Design in photography.
SUBMIT YOUR WORK
Open call for entries
Enter a photographic project on any topic, of any genre, and in any format. All photographers welcome. We’re interested in the execution, the originality and the meaning of your photography. There are no categories or themes so enjoy the freedom and submit your main body of work.
How to enter
– Submit a series of 5 to 20 photos. Your submission should have a cohesive theme or aesthetic.
– The entry fee is $45 and all submissions must be received by the deadline of December 31, 2024.
EDITION IX WINNER
CHARLES XELOT
We’re delighted to announce Charles Xelot as the winner of our Edition IX Series Award with his series White Water, judged Lisa Woodward and Mia Dalglish, co-curators at Pictura Gallery in Bloomington, IN. His work will be exhibited in a solo show at Pictura Gallery in summer 2024.
There are photographers who are large format magicians, and their ranks are small. Charles Xelot’s project White Water has the visionary scope that places him among them. It’s amazing when a photograph is capable of rendering something of massive scale, so that you really feel its size and weight. Xelot’s work succeeds in conveying the magnitude of the arctic sea and her vessels, and the gravity of the risk involved in crossing it.
In seeking to understand environmental concerns, White Water makes the physical difficulties of moving energy very real. The project is deep and resolved, and equal to the weight of its subject.
Xelot has an excellent sense for lighting. His images play out a drama, where extraordinary natural light clashes with the high powered man-made illumination from the ships. Xelot’s prowess with his tools is combined with a sensitivity to the inner lives of the sailors. Inside the vessels, the images scale down to the tight living quarters of the crew. The close stillness of the portraits conveys the emotional landscape of sailors who live for months drifting through the ice. The breadth of the project is both grand and intimate.
The presiding jury
EDITION VIII WINNER
ANDREA DE FRANCISCIS
We’re delighted to announce Andrea de Franciscis as the winner of our Edition VIII Series Award with his series When The Peacocks Dance, judged Kinuko Asano, Artistic Director at Écho 119 Gallery, and art historian and journalist Zoé Isle de Beauchaine.
With Andréa’s powerful and coherent body of work it is clear that he has carefully considered his series both as individual images and as a whole. His manual interventions made to each scene are anything but incidental – the choices made in the processing of the images (the use of flash, colour, framing, the effects of shadows creating silhouettes etc.) evoking the effervescence and chaos described in his introductory text. The form truly serves the purpose. This is a photographer who knows what he wants to express and how he wants to do it. He has created a work that we found great pleasure in discovering.
Andrea de Franciscis’ perspective on this often-photographed country is original and poetic. There is a documentary element, but he augments it with a conceptual, aesthetic approach, intensifying the colours with, for example, the use of filters and the play of light, or by enhancing the shots with paint or gold leaf which made us think of traditional Indian miniature paintings. It’s a welcome departure from the stereotypical images of the country.
The presiding jury
EDITION VII WINNER
WOIDE & FAIRFAX-WOODS
We’re delighted to announce Henry Woide & Vanessa Fairfax-Woods as the winners of our Edition VII Series Award with their series On The Land An Oak Will Grow, judged by Muriel Mager, Founder and Director of Contour Gallery in Rotterdam.
Seeking to push the boundaries of their usual solo work, Woide and Fairfax-Woods created performances in nature, distorting the natural world around them into an imaginary realm. It is meant as an escape from the reality of the modern world – the pace, politics, consumerism – and its emphasis on the surface which can be wearing. An invitation into a new, eerily beautiful and endlessly fascinating place.
The interaction between the two artists makes for a new and refreshing view on the medium photography, creating space for a different vision of what photography can be. What is usually static becomes more fluid, more playful. To me as a gallerist and curator, I enjoy the fact that each artist comes from a different medium – Woide a landscape and architectural photographer, and Fairfax-Woods a conceptual and performative photographer – as it adds value and weight to the storyline they create. Their images feel specific, a bit eerie and open to interpretation from multiple angles. I look forward to seeing more creativity and the merging of genres and mediums as it appears they are.
Muriel Mager
EDITION VI WINNER
MARC RESSANG
Marc Ressang was announced as the winner of our Edition VI (2019/20) Series Award with his series Transcendence, judged by Jehan De Bujaboux of Fisheye Gallery in Paris. The series caught de Bujaboux’s attention “by the documentary treatment of a conception of the human being very different from the binary approach of Western genders“.
“Transcendence is a project about the spiritual spheres of people outside of the binary gender labels. Nat Kadaw are spirit mediums in Myanmar. Stemming from pre-Buddhist times, they continue to be popular with the Buddhist population. Although traditionally a role carried on from mother to daughter, it is now a respectable role in society for the gay and trans community as well.
In South Sulawesi, Indonesia, the Bissu are known as the “fifth gender” within Buginese society. Instead of identifying as cisgender men, women, trans-men or trans-women, they see themselves as gender-transcendent. For hundreds of years, they have occupied the traditional role of shaman or priest. Although stemming from pre-Islamic times, the Bissu still play an important part in rituals and ceremonies such as healing the sick, securing crop harvests and blessing pilgrimages to Mecca.”- Marc Ressang
Marc’s sensitive and evocative work is comprised of two distinct halves – colorful, candid portraits of the Bissu and Nat Kadaw in formal wear, in the clamor of the ceremonies he describes in his series statement; and more subtle, somber portraits of those same people alone in the natural landscape. It is these contrasts in setting, energy, color palette and his deft control of light and shadow that help present a complex, multi-faceted picture of two communities that acts to challenge our Western preconceptions of gender, and invites reflection on perspectives, rituals and beliefs that may differ to our own.
Life Framer
EDITION V WINNER
ANABELA PINTO
Anabela Pinto was announced as the winner of our Edition V (2018/19) Series Award with her series Precious Things, judged by Yan Di Meglio of Galerie Intervalle in Paris. He chose Anabela’s work for “her ability to free herself from the inner reality of photographs with this intimate and common subject matter, delivering a photographic work that is both delicate and powerful”. Anabela’s work was exhibited at Galerie Intervalle from 17 January to 11 July 2020.
“Precious Things is an ongoing series that reflects on the contours of materialistic desire and its relationship with the pursuit of happiness. Even when less visible, the presence of technologies as well as our interactions with consumer objects is a constant that transforms our living environment, creating new visual landscapes and specific aesthetics that tinge and shape our everyday rituals. Steeped in nostalgia, home electronics become the main subjects in open ended narratives that incite the imagination of the viewer, while speaking of closeness, dependence, frustration, and happiness, that inherently relate with objects of desire – our precious things.”– Anabela Pinto
Anabela Pinto, like Marcel Duchamp a century ago, does not just reproduce reality with her defined vision of what we would call the “everyday life”, but she also questions along the way the relationships that we have with these everyday consumer items. The staged photographs place the viewer at the center of the work, and all the more so since these scenes speak to everyone. As with Duchamp’s Ready-Made, her work is inhabited by a strange familiarity, however this impression of “déjà vu” is a pure illusion that she magically orchestrates.
Yan Di Meglio
EDITION IV WINNER
DILLON MARSH
Dillon Marsh was announced as the winner of our Edition IV (2017/18) Series Award, with his series For What It’s Worth. Judged by Gerardo Montiel Klint, Ana Casa Broda and Gabriela González Reyes of Hydra + Fotografía Gallery in Mexico City, they chose Dillon’s work for his seamless and inventive combination of photography and computer-generated imagery in exploring a timely and important environmental issue. Dillon’s work was exhibited at Hydra + Fotografía from 6 December 2018 to 15 January 2019.
“Whether they are active or long dormant, mines speak of a combination of sacrifice and gain. Their features are crude, unsightly scars on the landscape – unlikely feats of hard labour and specialised engineering, constructed to extract value from the earth but also exacting a price.
These images combine photography and computer generated elements in an effort to visualise the output of a mine. The CGI spheres represent a scale model of the total amount of metals extracted from the ground. By doing so, the intention is to create a kind of visualisation of the merits and shortfalls of mining in South Africa, an industry that has shaped the history and economy of the country so radically.” – Dillon Marsh
This project is interesting from many different angles: It makes a reflection on society, the economy, politics, capitalism and ecology. And at the same time it addresses the boundaries and crossover between the mediums of photography and of computer-generated imagery in a seamless way that relates to our everyday experiences in cinema, TV and transmedia, where reality and fiction are not easy to distinguish.
The presiding jury
EDITION III WINNER
FREDERIK BUYCKX
The winner for 2017, selected by acclaimed fine-art photographer Mona Kuhn, was Frederik Buyckx with his series ‘WOLF’. His series was presented at a solo exhibition at Matèria Gallery in Rome from 8 June to 4 July 2017, curated by Mona, Life Framer and Matèria Gallery owner Niccolò Fano.
Looking through the images of Frederik Buyckx, words such as magical, ethereal, and enigmatic spring to mind. Perhaps it is the way the Belgian photographer deftly renders the scenes before him in black and white, his touch subtle and light; or maybe it is the intrinsic beauty of the landscapes and the compositions he makes in and of these places. Surely it is all of these things, yet a second glance confirms what we already know: these images are ultimately indefinable, they exist in a realm of their own, and no matter how hard we try it is impossible to put a finger on what makes them so captivating.
But that is precisely the joy of such a body of work – one that delights in its mysteriousness. Motivated by a desire to immerse himself in nature and experience both its beauty and fearsome spirit first-hand, Buyckx journeyed across Europe, crossing paths with people and animals who live off the land. Allowing himself to be at one with the landscapes he encountered, in the way a wolf might, Buyckx embraced the inevitable loneliness that came his way, deliberately entering into uncomfortable situations so he could photograph what he was seeing and experiencing in the most real way possible.
