Tim Gruber and Jenn Ackerman use both photography and video to tell stories for editorial and commercial clients. 
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I was happy to receive an email in my inbox earlier this summer from the Magenta Flash Forward competition letting me know that I was chosen as an honorable mention for one of their 2010 Emerging Photographers for my Served Out: Aging and Dying Behind Bars project. There’s some great talent on the winners page of their site. Congrats to all the winners.
A trailer of the video portion of the project was also screened for the first time at the LOOKbetween festival we blogged about earlier. I’ll try to have that up to share with you all soon.
A few outtakes from the project. See more at the Served Out: Aging and Dying Behind Bars section on our website.
By now I know well enough that you can’t put a lot of weight in contests, but we all know they’re good for keeping our name out there. I was happy to be included in the Communication Arts Photography Annual for my Served Out: Aging and Dying Behind Bars project. Communication Arts dedicated a full two pages to the project and the reproduction was spot on.
Contest season is practically upon us again and this will be the first year where I no longer focus my efforts on photojournalism contests and make the shift towards contests seen by more art buyers and magazine photo editors. One thing I’m going to miss about the PJ contests is how dirt cheap they are compared to a lot of the fine art and glossy magazine contests out there. Entering 15+ images for a mere 40 bucks seems like such a bargain now.
The project on the Communication Arts website:
Quoting one juror as commentating that 90% of the pictures submitted were about 10% of the world, he questioned why most photojournalism investigates a very limited series of tropes in a very limited series of visual approaches, becoming a self replicating machine that churns of copies of itself in perpetual motion, which he described as a ‘feeling that photojournalism, rather than trying to reinvent itself its trying to copy itself.
Read more from the article on World Press Photo at the Foto8 website.
The New York Photo Awards released their list of nominees yesterday and I found myself on the list with a lot of talented folks including Jenn.
The contest is also my slow departure from what I consider my traditional photojournalism roots. This has been the first year that I’ve primarily focused on contests that are seen outside of the newspaper world. It’s been a slow and gradual progression, but over the past year I’m finding myself growing more distant from my PJ roots. That’s for a different post though.
I’m a nominee in the editorial series category for my prison project, which after months of struggling to find a name Jenn and I finally have a title we like; Served Out: Aging and Dying Behind Bars. We’ll see how it plays out, but considering the talent that populates the list I’m happy to be a nominee. Now only if I could find a way for the project and website to produce itself.
An image from the prison series:
With the contest season slowly coming to a close I enjoyed a recent post by Trent Nelson on contests in response to a student threatening to burn his photos. A panel of contest judges deemed the young photographer and all the entries in the Young Scottish Photographer of the Year category to be unworthy of the honor.
Apparently the young photographer was misquoted and never threatened to burn his photos, rather he said he’d be burning bridges by speaking out.
What fun is that? Burn those suckers. (Alright I didn’t major in PR so I’m not sure if that’s the best move.)
After finishing up my latest contest entry last night I had the same thoughts linger in my head that always appear after I enter a contest:
Why do I do this? What good is this for? If I’m doing this to give a voice to my subjects why bother? Why expose myself to the torture of losing?
The reality remains though — I’m new to the business and don’t have much of a career(if you can call it that) in this field I love. A contest helps bring credibility to my work.
We all know our field is extremely competitive and talent flows from all corners. Contests are a way to give yourself an edge. In many ways it’s like building a brand. Your name and your work are your brand. It’s your passion and you want validation that your hard work means something to your peers.
This recent blog post on Innovation in College Media touches on the idea of branding yourself in hopes of landing a job:
You might think you’re too young in your career to build a brand. Wrong. You need to start developing it now. Literally, your employer is purchasing your skills over someone else. You have to sell that idea to them. This requires you to think in marketing and advertising mode.
Contests are also a chance to reflect on the year. What worked? What didn’t? Did I meet the goals I set out for myself? It’s a chance to see how many bad photos I took(a lot) and serves as a reminder that there’s always more that can be done.
It’s a wonderful way to gauge your growth against not only yourself, but your peers.
What do we know for certain about contests?
As Melissa states:
They are such a double-edged sword. You win: You feel validated. Your bosses and publications are happy. Your resume gets padded with a few extra lines. You lose: You take it personally. You feel like your best is not good enough. Your ego get deflated.
Love ‘em or hate ‘em they’re a part of our business.
Trent says it best:
To all of you young photographers looking to be the next big thing: Invest your emotion into your work, not into contest wins. Contests are not science. The results are subjective and unpredictable. If you work hard and stay focused on your art, then recognition will come.
I came home to this last year on the floor in my house and it
served as a nice reminder that there’s more to life than contests.
Thanks guys.
Editor and Publisher have announced the winners in their 2007 Photos of the Year contest. Read the article here. See the gallery of winners here.
There’s some great images and others that leave me puzzled, but that’s the nature of contests.
An overhead umbrella shot winning best feature image in the 25k to 99k circulation category? It’s a fine daily weather feature, but in a contest?
Sure it’s easy on the eyes and there’s nothing lacking in the composition department. But this is a photojournalism contest not an art contest.
Where’s the content? Where’s the journalism?
Contests are often seen as setting the bar in this industry and I’m not sure the judges are sending the right message with this one. Nothing against the photographer, but this one falls short for me on what E&P lists as their definition of a feature photo: Features: A storytelling photo used in any section of the newspaper, often with strong human interest.
Perhaps I’m being over critical thanks to my picture story class this quarter and have demanded more of myself, my classmates and the industry as storytellers.
For me this image doesn’t help increase our voice as storytellers if anything it puts us back in the category of a being a service department.
Rant off.