Jerwood Photography Award

Tonight I went to the Jerwood Gallery Space to attend a talk about and with this year’s winners of the 2007 Jerwood Photography Awards, chaired by Martin Barnes, Senior Curator for photography at the Victoria and Albert Museum. All five winners this year, Moira Lovell, Dana Popa, Sophie Gerrard, Kevin Newark and Edmund Kevill-Davies are alumni of the London College of Communication. And two of them are even alumni of the MA in photojournalism and documentary photography. Seems the yardstick will be quite high for us graduating this year… But, of course, it was great to see our alumni to be so successful… I knew most of the works from last year’s graduation show… but was most impressed by Dana’s work on women trafficking in Eastern Europe (‘Not Natasha’).

It was interesting to listen to Martin Barnes (who was also in the jury choosing the winners) explain how he looks at photographs. He said that foremost and first he looks at the aesthetic and visual qualities of a body of work… He does not even read the accompanying text when looking at the first selection. Only second, he will consider the conceptual, contextual and historical dimensions of any body of work. It was refreshing to hear him say that… after all, photography is a visual art and should be evaluated as such in the first instance… It goes without saying that the second dimension is a conditio sine qua non to make a body of work truly outstanding… however, without the visual quality a body of work just becomes a lot of text to read to understand mediocre photographs or in other words plainly boring…

Guess where I ended up afterwards? :-) Monday is Spice of Life day :-)