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Alessandro Penso  Youth denied: young immigrants in Greece

Alessandro Penso: Youth denied: young immigrants in Greece.

Mixed tones of international photography

The Terry O’Neill photography competition was started by Lucy Bell in 2007 as a small online competition which is gaining momentum and growing in stature by the year.

HOT reporter Lauris Morgan-Griffiths went along to the Lucy Bell Gallery to see the results of this year’s award.

Lucy Bell started the competition to give exposure to young photographers and a bunk up the career ladder in a changing digital world. And certainly the competition has had its impact this year as some winners and shortlisters have already gained commissions and been widely interviewed, as well as  having their images picked up and flown on social media.

The competition has no thematic brief; its only criterion is that the photographs submitted are part of a series. Consequently, entering the gallery one is struck by a fascinating eclectic mix of images that seem to straddle genres: documentary into political, political into social documentary, landscape into documentary.

Winner Alessandro Penso – his series Youth Denied: Young Immigrants in Greece – lived amongst the young people arriving in a sort of no-man’s-land around the city of Patras: living in limbo, no way forward and no way back. The photographs show the young men/teenagers’ lives in pitiful conditions, having escaped from wars, religious and political persecution and meeting another type of discrimination. The result of the photograph of the man being callously hit by a car went viral with the result that young Greeks contacted Alessandro saying they were ashamed of their country and what could they do about it?

Second is Wendy Sacks’ Immersed in Living Water. Very beautiful they are too, but to me something is lacking. Maybe I don’t understand them. Lucy Bell tells me I am not alone, although many people, and specifically the judges, really loved them. Splitting opinion down the middle is always interesting and shows that Wendy’s message and images are communicating to some people.  Now disabled, Wendy was a paediatric emergency physician and would bath her very ill patients in water. I assume these are symbolic postures describing Wendy’s memories of some of those children she cared for. Most look relaxed, letting the water take their pain; poignantly, a hand reaches out; a child looks stressed; two hands barely touch; two adolelscent girls curl around each other; a leg protrudes into two girls’ space, with one child looking uncertainly at the camera.

Marc Wilson The Last Stand

Marc Wilson: The Last Stand

However, Marc Wilson’s atmospheric landscapes, The Last Stand, I do empathise with. Travelling around Britain to northern Europe Marc has photographed the now redundant military defences. They seem oddly vulnerable as some are washed up or covered in lichen as they begin to erode. They somehow illustrate the futility of war as well as their redundancy as war has moved on into the digital age. Marc has documented these sites in their specific landscape from Cornwall to the north-west of Scotland. Besides the photographs, the final body of work  contains research text of the history of the locations, the objects contained there, as well as “the histories, the stories and the memories contained within.”

Lucy Bell and Terry O’Neill both agree that the standard was so high it was really difficult to select the winners  and  the seven runners-up. The only black-and-white series is Mimi Mollica’s Sicily, which illustrates the Mafia’s economic and social effect in Sicily – bullet holes in a window, an abandoned hillside village, a death wreath and a man who looks as if he is a gangster straight out of central casting – his face rearranged, a dead stare;  it is a character  you wouldn’t want to meet at night  in a dark alley.

There are the proud faces of voodoo dancers by Ann-Christine Woehrl in Benin: The

Piers Calvert Columbian Jungle

Piers Calvert: Colombian Jungle

Cradle of Voodoo, and in Piers Calvert’s Colombian Jungle, the painted faces of the Yucuna Indians of Colombia shyly looking from behind their painted faces, hand and mask. A positive side of the Colombian civil war has been that the tribe have so retained much of their culture. However, for how long? Already there are signs of Western creep when you see a Yucuna wearing a Tinkerbell dress, with a gold watch and a key around her neck.

There are photographs by Alinka Echeverria, Becoming South Sudan, of the transition to South Sudan, Jon Tonks, Before and After Falkland Islands, Massimo Barberio, 15th October 2012, the demonstration against the financial institutions in Rome, and Andy Rudak’s surreal series of Cardboard Cities. They are scaled down cardboard models of populous city streets – New York, London, Tokyo, Mumbai and Paris, empty with a dream-like dimension, with an oddly positioned animal, a hedgehog, an owl, a deer.

The last word should go to Terry O’Neill.  What are his personal tips for taking a good photograph? Simply,  “Fill the frame.  Don’t pay attention to anyone else and do what you feel.”

The exhibition is at the Lucy Bell Gallery 22 February-22 March.
More information about the Terry O’Neill Award.
Films to watch: youtube1 and youtube2

 

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Posted 09:24 Sunday, Feb 24, 2013 In: Photography

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