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Department of Social Anthropology

 

'Old' Selva (Patrick O'Hare, 2015)

The nine entries in this year’s “Images Fresh from the Field” competition were all richly deserving of awards. They varied widely in subject matter, visual approach, and analytic questions, but they all succeeded vividly at the competition remit of conveying “a strong sense of human life and experience” in the setting of the photographer’s fieldwork.

The judges, Professor Caroline Humphrey and Dr Rupert Stasch, sought to evaluate the submissions according to the quality of their visual content, their visual communication of anthropological ideas, and the quality of analytic contextualization provided in the accompanying written statements. The judges have awarded the competition prizes as follows:

First Prize was awarded to Patrick O’Hare with ‘Wastelands, Montevideo’.

O’Hare’s entry stood out for the strong play of visual form in the images, the poetic intensity of the images’ portrayal of embodied human presence and action in a material surroundings, and the directness of connection between these visual qualities of the images and the ethnographic problematic of the recyclers’ social position.

Highly commended in second place was John Fahy with ‘ISKCON, Mayapur’.

Fahy’s entry was notable for the extraordinarily high visual beauty of all its images, and the vivid qualities of human emotion and community undertaking conveyed through its cross-section of subjects.

Commended in third place was Jonas Tinius with ‘Isolation, Oberhausen’.

Tinius’ entry was striking for its visual meditation on a problematic of place, shelter, and human reflexivity about the emotion and politics of not belonging, and the clarity of that concept across the different components of the submission.

The judges wish to extend to all entrants a warm expression of gratitude for sharing their valuable images and fieldwork descriptions.

Please see the below links for photos and narratives of all entrants.

Patrick O’Hare: Fieldwork in Uruguay

John Fahy: Fieldwork in West Bengal

Jonas Tinius: Fieldwork in Germany

Michael Long: Fieldwork in People's Republic of China

Hugh Williamson: Fieldwork in Romania

Clara Devlieger: Fieldwork in the Democratic Republic of Congo

Natalie Morningstar: Fieldwork in Ireland

Tijana Radeska: Fieldwork in Serbia

Michelle H J Tsai: Fieldwork in Taiwan, China and France