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October 2, 2010
I did not know about the Doug Moran photographic prize until I stumbled across it in a post by Paul Atkins. I had thought that the Moran prize was for just for portrait painting and I hadn't realized that a contemporary photographic prize had been introduced in 2007.
I was taken by this image:
Sonia Esposito, self portrait, 2010
The majority of the finalists appear to work in the photojournalism or street photography style and there is little in the way of landscapes or urbanscapes. In this context of photography as a form of documentation, a way to detail something that already exists, it was the self portraits that caught my eye.
Samantha Everton Surrender, from Utopia, 2009
Everton's work is typically highly stylized and staged; choreographed and planned to the finest detail in the controlled studio environment as can be seen in Vintage Dolls. The work in the Utopia series is more spontaneous as it is under the sea relying on the sunlight and the were shot using an old, ($A39) plastic camera with only two light settings - for shadow and sun. The sea gives the murkiness and mud, seaweed and rocks, atmosphere and ambiguity.
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