The entries in this year’s 'Images Fresh from the Field' Graduate Photographic competition were all of a very high quality and the judges, Professor Caroline Humphrey and Dr Rupert Stasch, would like to thank all those who participated. The judges sought to evaluate the submissions according to the quality of their visual content, the sense of human life and experience depicted, and the anthropological concepts thematically expressed through the combined visual and written parts of the submission. The judges felt that taken together, the complete set of submissions offered this year is a wonderful indication of the complex diversity of innovative anthropological topics being sensitively examined by a current generation of postgraduate research students.
The judges have awarded the competition prizes as follows:
1st prize - Tom Powell Davies - Baptism in Sawa Erma, Asmat
The images in this entry are extraordinarily rich in their vivid depiction of so many details of different persons’ facial expressions and bodily postures of shared emotional engagement with the unfolding events. The accompanying text communicates a great deal of the further cultural complexity of the depicted event, surrounding what is overtly visible in the images.
2nd prize (highly commended) - Sophia Hornbacher-Schönleber - Mobilised Mosque
The organization of shape and colour each image in this entry is remarkably beautiful. The images work very effectively together as a set. They are each very different in content, but are connected in space, and the photographer’s contextualizing statement further supports the entry’s force of communicating an overall situation of many different intersecting layers of political and cultural order.
3rd prize (commended) - Jakob Askjer - Underground electronic dance music in Ramallah
These images are aesthetically daring in qualities of color, exposure, and format, but in ways that we felt were very successful in supporting ethnographic understanding of the emotional, moral atmosphere of the depicted spaces and events.
Congratulations to the winners and thanks again to all those who entered.
All entrants' photographs can be viewed here.