Choice Awards: 

CURATOR'S CHOICE
JUROR: ERIN O'TOOLE, Assistant Curator of Photography, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Congratulations to all the photographers who submitted to this contest. It was not easy to select such a small number of winners from this talented field.

The six photographers I selected each presented a body of work notable for its stylistic distinctiveness and visual sophistication. While the photographs they submitted vary widely in terms of subject matter and style, they all engage thoughtfully and directly with the here and now.

McNair Evans garnered first prize for his lyrical use of light. All of the photographs he submitted are suffused with a warm, moody glow. They are emotional pictures whose languid dreaminess is tinged with melancholy and a palpable sense of loss.

For second prize I chose Walter Astrada's humanistic war photographs. These powerful and heartwrenching pictures deal with the effects of war and human trafficking on women and children. The work he submitted is at once beautiful and hard-hitting, and demonstrates Astrada's impressive range and sensitivity.

Markel Redondo's architectural photographs won third prize. From his close-up formal compositions to his more open studies of buildings and their environs, all of the photographs he submitted were tightly composed and beautifully seen.

Honorable mention went to Tom Atwood for his quirky, often hysterical environmental portraits; to Susana Raab for the sense of place she evokes with color; and to Steve Davis for his array of striking landscapes, ranging from the luscious to the stark.

--Erin O'Toole

DEALER'S CHOICE

JUROR: DIANNE VANDERLIP, Curator, Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Curator Emeritus, Denver Art Museum

First, thanks to all of the photographers who collectively submitted one thousand nine hundred seventy-seven images to this extremely rigorous competition. Because I accepted the honor of being the sole juror and was charged with selecting just six artists, I knew I would be disappointing many of whom are extraordinarily accomplished. It's important for all of you, awarded or otherwise, to remember that a different juror would have selected a different group of winners.

Basically, my main criterion was to select works I couldn't stop looking at. That generally included works that exhibited an original point of view and whose concept, composition, format and execution came together flawlessly, resulting in a compelling image.

Because I was asked to judge the entire body of work each entrant submitted, I paid a lot of attention to how each photographer presented themselves. Some only submitted three or four closely related images probably hoping to show consistency, others submitted ten or more, possibly in hopes of showing the range of their different strengths. Neither approach was right nor wrong as long as the visual voice was resonant and original. Final selections included one artist who submitted just three images, another that submitted eight.

The overall quality of the submissions was so high and so professional that I wondered if it would be possible to reduce the selections to just six, because it meant I would be eliminating very fine, experienced artists who had already received significant awards and been the subject of important exhibitions.

Over the course of a week, I looked at every single image several times, some of them over and over and over. The first to be eliminated were those I thought were too derivative of other well known artists who had already staked the same ground as the applicants. I saw too many works that looked like Ansel Adams, Tina Barney, Richard Billingham, Andreas Gursky, Loretta Lux, Gregory Crewdson, etc. And though everyone is influenced by someone, one must transcend the fine line between influence and direct appropriation in order to make the work one's own.

Being a judge means bringing a very personal aesthetic to the process. I don't have much interest in works that rely primarily on 'arty' technique... clever framing, fuzzy focus, smeared emulsions, etc. Though there are a lot of ways to make an image, most of those overworked methods result in visual clichés and are therefore limited in their appeal. They did not get very far in this competition.

We live in such a peripatetic time. Many of the works submitted emphasized the exotic and extraordinary places the photographers had visited. Some of those images were really stunning, but only a few transcended the fact of the place in favor of art. I think of Agatha Christie finding the most compelling stories in her own backyard.

Every work that was finally included was included for a very specific reason... just as every work that was excluded was finally let go for a very specific reason. The three winners were very different from each other and stood out as unique among their competition.

The really, really hard part was choosing the final round which included only twenty photographers. For those of you who were not selected for that round, it was such as close competition, you very well could have been.

After days and days of looking and pondering I found most of the work I kept going back to had 'something' that made me want to keep looking.

Again, I thank all of you for submitting yourself to this process and for allowing me to see your work.

--Dianne Perry Vanderlip

EDITOR'S CHOICE

JUROR: TODD JAMES, Senior Photo Editor, National Geographic Magazine

I have never had more fun or struggled so hard to rank the work of so many talented photographers. The reason is simple. The CENTER Choice Awards draws a startling amount of good work across many genres. That makes picking the best of the best very difficult.

Ranking this much good work is inherently subjective and relies on a mix of intuition and reasoning. What qualities cut across genres for me? I favored highly personal work where the photographer is seeing with feeling. Of course the best work must have a consistent sensibility, be well crafted, and freshly seen, but it needs to offer more than that. I want a touch of mystery, a sense of joy or playfulness or a sense of awe. I want to feel something when I look at the photographs.
 

Matt Eich's photographs seem full of mystery to me like a dark novel that is hard to put down because it promises to reveal its secret in the next moment. In only four frames he develops a compelling narrative. What is this world of gators, guns, ferrets and humid nights? The answer does not come easily. It is hard to look away.
 

The subject of Dimitri Mellos's photographs is not the street so much as it is Dimitri. The joy and surprise he sees in the fleeting details of ordinary life is contagious. By exploiting the unique way a still camera can sort one fraction of a second from another, and combining that with a lyrical way of seeing the world, Dimitri has arrived at what fun looks like frozen in time.
 

Eric White finds an austere and slightly disturbing beauty in disparate places. His formal aesthetic sense connects one scene to the next so that peaches rotting at the side of the road and animal heads in a meat case seem like two halves of a whole. The subtle beauty of two landscapes, a quarry and a beach, both dissected by man are beautifully rendered. But the quiet beauty that lures us in hints at something darker and begs the question: What is our role in these scenes of not quite natural beauty?
 

Evans McNair's photographs seem as honest and straight forward to me as their titles; Kids Fishing, Dad's Company Car, Unfinished Card Game. These are quiet gentle photographs, highly personal and full of feeling. This collection of private moments is full of intimacy and feeling like a diary or a poem.
 

What are Ana Galan's women thinking or feeling? I'm not quite sure but I want to know, and I keep studying their faces for answers. I admit I have a weakness for a series of photographs that lets me carefully compare the similarities and differences between things, but these portraits are particularly rewarding. Their ambiguous emotional state makes me stare right back. Here there is beauty in restraint.

Daryl Peveto shows us what the end of the road looks like. It is hot as hell and slightly mad. His portrayal of squatters living in trailers offers a startling glimpse into the parallel universe of the underclass in America.
 

I wish there were more ways of recognizing the many talented photographers who shared their work with CENTER and with me. My praise and my enjoyment extend well beyond the few awards I have to give. I am encouraged by the depth of talent and the number of photographers who recognize that great photography has as much to do with feeling as it does with seeing. Nice work. Thank you for sharing it with me.
 

--Todd James