The 1000 Words Award

The 1000 Words Award for European photographers is a major initiative in collaboration with The Other European Travellers, a project co-ordinated by Cobertura Photo and co-organised by Atelier de Visu, 1000 Words and Festival Voci di Foto in partnership with Magnum Photos. It is part-funded by The Education Audiovisual and Culture Exchange Agency (EACEA) under the auspices of the EU Culture Programme.

Photographers are invited to apply for an opportunity to realise a new body of work with the supervision of several high-profile photographers and industry experts.

Applications can be submitted online only. The closing date is 23 July 2012 (5pm GMT). There are 4 places available.

Fee: £25.00 (GBP)

The 1000 Words Award includes:

• £1,000 cash prize
• 18 month mentorship programme
• 3 workshops with Jeffrey Silverthorne, Antoine d’Agata and Patrick Zachmann in London, Marseille and Seville respectively, including financial assistance with accommodation and travel
• Travelling group exhibition through the UK, France, Spain and Italy
• Catalogue and DVD
• Feature in 1000 Words Photography Magazine.

The 1000 Words Award is open to photographers born or based in the EU.

An internationally renown jury will review each entry submitted. Their final 4 will join 8 other European photographers selected by Cobertura Photo and Atelier de Visu.

The 1000 Words Award selection panel is:

• Simon Baker, Curator of Photography at Tate
• Brett Rogers, Director of The Photographers’ Gallery, London
• Dewi Lewis, Director at Dewi Lewis Publishing
• Tim Clark and Michael Grieve, Editors at 1000 Words Photography Magazine.

All participants will be selected according to criteria of excellence of their artistic approach, gender parity, mix of backgrounds, diversity of concepts and the multiplicity of approaches.

How to apply

1. Please email a portfolio of 10-15 images from any previous project (JPEG format, 72 dpi, each image no larger than 1MB). Links to work online will not be considered
2. An artist statement of up to 150 words or a CV (You do not need to send a proposal for the new body of work at this stage)
3. Submission fee: £25 (Through Paypal please enter your name and use the “Buy Now” button below, or send a cheque made payable to 1000 Words Photography Ltd: to 1000 Words Photography, 29 The Arthaus, 205 Richmond Road, London, E8 3FF, UK)

Deadline: 23 July 2012 (5pm GMT)
Email submissions to: awards@1000wordsmag.com

Eligibility

The 1000 Words Award is open to photographers of any age, born or based within the EU. Students in full-time or part-time education, including PhD students, are also eligible for the award. Applicants do not need to have completed a degree in photography or an art-based subject. Photographers working collaboratively can also apply.

Selection procedure

Application closing date: 23 July 2012
Receipt of applications acknowledged: 24 July 2012
Successful candidates announced: 6 August 2012
First local meeting: 26 September 2012
Workshop in Seville: 29 October - 3 November 2012
Second local meeting: 12 December 2012
Third local meeting: 20 February 2013
Workshop in London: March 2013
Fourth local meeting: 15 May 2013
Workshop in Marseille: July 2013
Catalogue launch: December 2013
Travelling exhibition: January 2014-

Workshops

© Jeffrey Silverthorne

Through his photography Jeffrey Silverthorne explores the question of sex and death, as well as the notions of boundary and transgression. Active since the end of the 60’s, he has been accumulating series on extreme subjects: a slaughter house, a morgue, brothels or a community of transvestites and transsexuals. Silverthorne abandons any notion of objective documentation, and instead further exposes himself and explores his own psychology in a series of intense and subjectively structured images. Born in Hawaii in 1946, Silverthorne studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and has gone on to publish his work in the books Directions For Leaving, Boystown, The Perfume of Desire and most recently Travel Plans in 2011. He has had numerous international exhibitions including Rencontres d'Arles and Musée de l’ Elysée. Jeffrey Silverthorne is represented by Agence Vu’ and Gallery Vu’ .

© Antoine d’Agata

Antoine d’Agata is without doubt one of the most unique and important photographers of our age. His imagery is characterised by an intense and highly subjective experience that pushes the limits of social documentary photography. Born in Marseille, 1961, he left France in 1990 to study at The International Centre for Photography (ICP) in New York alongside Nan Goldin and Larry Clark. His work has been published in the books Insomnia, Vortex, Stigma and Agonie amongst others, and he has been exhibited internationally at galleries and festivals including Rencontres d’Arles, Noorderlicht, FotoFreo and The Photographers Gallery, London. His latest exhibition, Anticorps, a world premiere of a grand touring overview, opened on the 26 May at The Hague Museum of Photography, and runs until the 3 September. He has been a member of Magnum Photos since 2004 and is represented by Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire in Paris.

Their workshops are designed to allow photographers to experiment with new approaches to the creative process. You will be encouraged to build intimate rapport with your subjects, incorporating personal vision and voice into your photography.

The topic of “The Other European Travellers” specifically relates to transformations in the lives of people who have travelled or migrated across Europe. It is also broad to allow you the freedom to produce more personal and self-experienced responses as well as conceptual interpretations of the brief.

A unique element of these workshops is marked by the involvement of several guest experts comprising photographers as well as curators, collectors and critics who will provide the following:

-Talks and seminars 

-Guided tours of exhibitions
-Visits to photo archives and family albums
-Access to private collections.

Each workshop lasts 5 days, and will be conducted in English. They will form the basis of your project.

Mentorship

Monthly group and one-to-one meetings with the 1000 Words editors will be held in London or by Skype/Internet to report on the progress of the participants’ projects. Sessions will be frank and informal with the view to providing photographers with the following:

-Discussion and critique of creative output
-The practical and conceptual vision needed to help attain your goals and develop the photographic project
-Assistance with self-representation, portfolio presentation and approaches to potential outlets in the editorial, publishing and gallery markets
-Resources to help enhance your work and realise the potential of your ideas.

Exhibitions

The workshop leaders (Jeffrey Silverthorne, Antoine d’Agata and Patrick Zachmann) and the participating photographers in The Other European Travellers project will show their work as a group exhibition in London, Seville and Marseille. The exhibition will then travel to other cultural venues, galleries and photography festivals across Europe. 

An innovative and engaging exhibition design will mix images, text and sound.

Catalogue and DVD

The publication will consist of the participants’ work alonside archive images and includes texts on the subject. The publication will be translated into 3 languages and have a print run of 1,500 copies. The accompanying DVD and sound files contribute to the project, and are based on material from different sources: interviews with the photographic subjects, sound files and musical scores. 

Feature on 1000 Words Photography Magazine

1000 Words will commission a highly-esteemed writer or photography critic to contribute an in-depth review of your final body of work which will be published in its distinctive and highly regarded online magazine alongside a carefully curated selection of your images.

Now on its fourteenth “issue” 1000 Words attracts approximately 140,000 unique visitors from more 120 countries every month. Its sister-site, the 1000 Words Blog, ranked at number 3 in The Top 25 UK Arts & Culture Blogs in a survey carried out by Creative Tourist in May 2010 and was also named as the winner of Arts Media Contacts’ Photography Blog of The Year Award 2010.

Conquering composition with Roger Ballen

© Michael Grieve/1000 Words

Since 1000 Words started organising workshops in Morocco, every photographer and creative who has led them has pushed their own particular strengths in a steadfast manner. Antoine d’Agata constantly asked “what do you want”, Anders Petersen insisted to ‘shoot from the gut’ and Erik Kessels conceptualised the found image. Roger Ballen’s mantra was to emphasise the formal qualities of the picture. Sufficient attention to what makes a picture work is often overlooked and taken for granted. Photographers wonder why their images are weak and more often than not it is because they have overlooked the most basic yet complex issue of composition.

Roger Ballen is very precise and tireless in his deconstruction of the photograph to understand and achieve the perfect pictorial balance. He understands that photography is hard work in a snappy happy world. Ultimately, the success of a photograph relies on the arrangement of the content within the frame devoid of ‘negative space’.

© Aurora Molina

1000 Words Workshops in Fez are challenging in different ways. The medina, with all is chaos and contradictions, provides the perfect capsule to transport your creative concerns into unknown territories. The photographers participating in the workshop were prepared to undo their preconceptions and raised the stakes in order to unlock new chambers into an imaginary world. Thanks to the following for joining us on the creative odyssey:

Jorg Sundermann (Germany)
Marlene de Lazaro (Cuba)
Mark Lanning (South Africa)
Sjoukje van Gool (The Netherlands)
Roger Mavity (UK)
Rob Houkes (The Netherlands)
Aurora Molina (Cuba)
Pier Filippo d’Acquarone (Italy)
Silvia Castro Yapur (Argentina)

© Sjoukje van Gool

1000 Words would like to thank Roger Ballen, a true gentleman, and his fabulous assistant Margeurite Rossouw. As always many thanks to photographer and good friend Omar Chennafi for his local knowledge and beautiful spirit. And Sean Stoker, 1000 Words Editorial/Programme Assistant, for his hard work, dependability and positive attitude. Finally, to Vanessa Bonnin for her hand in helping to deliver another successful workshop. A photo album of the workshop can be viewed on our Facebook page here.

 © Michael Grieve/1000 Words

Ori Gersht: Artist Book

Photoworks have commissioned these videos as part of their collaboration with Israeli-born artist, Ori Gersht. Here we are given an intimate behind-the-scenes look at Artist Book and his recent exhibition, This Storm is What We Call Progress, held at the Imperial War Museum. Artist Book was reviewed, somewhat disparagingly, in the latest issue of 1000 Words. The main crux of the writer’s argument pointed towards how the images perform (or fail to) in book format compared to experiencing the work as an exhibition. Not a new bone of contention by any means but obviously a noteworthy one since Ori Gerhst is both a highly accomplished and mindful artist, somebody from whom you would expect a more discerning approach to such an adaptation. As a piece of visual communication Artist Book is sloppy and ill-considered. Certain design decisions in relation to the book’s scale and size undersell his photography regardless of any "intimate/fetishistic object" PR spin that is put on it. Yes the production is impeccable, yes it offers a glimpse into Gerhst’s well of inspiration and yes the stories he narrates are undeniably emotive and beautifully shot but the simple fact remains; the project doesn’t translate well across mediums. It is therefore useful to remember that while the photobook market is booming the printed page is not always the best outlet for a photographer’s ideas. Artist Book is a case in point.

W.M. Hunt

Watch the indefatigable W.M. Hunt, a renown collector and dealer, in action. The first video is a montage of clips from a public lecture about The Unseen Eye: Photographs from the Unconscious, the first major US exhibition of his collection that ran from 1 October 2011 to 19 February 2012 at George Eastman House, from which Aperture and Thames & Hudson simultaneously published a book. The video posted below the fold is from Artlog, wherein he talks about his visceral approach to collecting, acquiring an eye for good work, and his advice for aspiring collectors.

Featured in the current issue of 1000 Words, the photographs of The Unseen Eye have a common theme - the gaze of the subject is averted, the face obscured, or the eyes firmly closed. The images evoke a wide range of emotions and are characterised, by what, at first glance, the subject conceals rather than what the camera reveals. 

W.M. Hunt was a founding partner of the prominent photography gallery HASTED HUNT in Chelsea, Manhatten and served as director of photography at Ricco/Maresca Gallery. He and his collecting have been featured in The New York Times and The Art Newspaper as well as on PBS. He is a professor at the School of Visual Arts and on the Board of Directors of the W.Eugene Smith Memorial Fund and The Center for Photography at Woodstock, N.Y., where he was the recipient of their Vision Award in 2009. He also served on the Board of Directors of AIPAD (Association of International Photography Art Dealers) and as chairman of Photographers + Friends United Against AIDS.

There are many words one can use to describe W.M. Hunt; funny, captivating, even legendary but his eloquence is his own and his book is my personal favourite so I cannot.

"Insist on engagement. Wrestle with what is difficult. Pretty is boring. Seek intensity." W.M. Hunt

A slideshow and talk by Diane Arbus @MoMA, New York

“About this time everyone suddenly decided I was meant to be an artist and I was given art lessons and a big box of oils and encouragement and everything. I painted and drew every once in a while for about four years with a teacher without admitting to anyone that I didn't like to paint or draw at all and i didn't know what I was doing. I used to pray and wish often to be a “great artist” and all the while I hated it and I didn't realise that I didn't want to be an artist at all. The horrible thing was that all the encouragement I got made me think that really I wanted to be an artist and made me keep pretending that I liked it and made me like it less and less until I hated it because it wasn't me that was being an artist; everybody was lifting me high up and crowning me and congratulating me and I was smiling -- and really I hated it and I hadn't done one single good piece of work. It was the craziest pretense in the world but even though i was pretending i believed in it, for about four years I had visions of being a great sad artist and I turned all my energies toward it when I wasn't an artist at all.”

Diane Arbus, 1940 autobiography, senior class assignment, Fieldston School

It was a good thing she gave painting and drawing!

For those in New York this weekend, MoMA is screening A Slide Show and Talk By Diane Arbus. The 40-minute film was compiled by Neil Selkirk, Doon Arbus, and Adam Shott from an original 1970 recording of a slide presentation given one year before the photographer’s death. It has been shown less than a dozen times publicly and offers us the rare opportunity to hear the photographer lecture on her images. Nearly 40 years after publication, Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph which features 80 of those images, remains one of our most popular photobooks.

Following the screening, novelist and president of PEN American Center, Francine Prose along with Pulitzer prize-winning author of The Hours, Michael Cunningham, and Doon Arbus discuss how the photographer’s “precise use of language” illuminates her pictures. They will also read from the recently released book, Diane Arbus: A Chronology, which was primarily composed of exerpts from her letters, notebooks, writings, and journals. Through her own words, they explore the nature of her observation. 1000 Words recently acquired a copy, and have been drunk on it ever since.

Robin Maddock @ TJ Boulting, London

© Robin Maddock

“Maddock’s views and snatches of life are both surreal and individual. He has the enviable ability to turn nothing much into something quite profound.” - Martin Parr

Opening tonight at TJ Boulting, is Robin Maddock's God Forgotten Face, an exhibition in conjunction with the book of the same name, published by Trolley, which examines aspects of the everyday life in Plymouth, a port town still bearing the scars of the Blitz.

The exhibition showcases both key images from the book as well as new additions, taken more recently. In the words of gallery director, Hannah Watson, these have the effect of “introducing a slight shift to a lighter and more lyrical interpretation of the city.”

In her press release for the show she goes on to say: “After two years spent living in the town, where he has had family all his life, Maddock achieves a familiar interaction with his subjects, visible through his portraits in night clubs and pubs, and in the witnessing of the various goings on down at the sea front or in the local rec. In the misty early morning a nun stops to call her dog, whilst later a police forecourt is bathed in light and transported to a sunny LA; Maddock’s insight into the city is at once affectionate and optimistic in outlook, but stamped with his own aesthetic and curiosity.

In the book Owen Hatherley writes with a similar affection In Praise of Blitzed Cities, citing that the negative and concrete environs that come into most people’s minds when they think of Plymouth are in fact overlooking its “shabby, ad hoc vitality that most heritage cities would die for.” As a town, Plymouth’s past has been one of ongoing economic and cultural isolation since the shrinking of the Navy. Now it reflects more a broader England in decline, whilst all the post-modern ironic contradictions of the evolving new economies are present; ‘Francis Drake’ is a shopping mall, and what was the ‘Royal Sovereign’ pub is now a ‘Firkin Doghouse’. 

His childhood memories of the place are also challenged by more adult quotidian realities of Maddock’s time there, and his own preconceptions; the journey’s question shifting from, ‘What am I doing here?’ to the more telling, ‘What am I, here?’ The ‘God Forgotten Face’ of the title, originally derived from the 1945 Philip Larkin poem Plymouth, and the words “Last kingdom of a gold forgotten face...”, perhaps coming to represent his own personal account as a photographer finding himself changed in the face of the subject he had returned to find.” 

The exhibition runs until 2 June 2012.

Is Photography Over?

Here's a blast from the not-too-distant past. Back in 2010 SFMOMA organised a fantastic two-day symposium, Is Photography Over? which has since prompted much debate on the current state of the medium.

Photography has almost always been in crisis. In the beginning, the terms of this crisis were cast as dichotomies: is photography science or art? Nature or technology? Representation or truth? This questioning has intensified and become more complicated over the intervening years. At times, the issues have required a profound rethinking of what photography is, does, and means. This is one of those times. Given the nature of contemporary art practice, the condition of visual culture, the advent of new technologies, and many other factors, what is at stake today in seeing something as a photograph? What is the value of continuing to speak of photography as a specific practice or discipline? Is photography over?

SFMOMA invited a range of major thinkers and practitioners to write brief responses to this question and then to convene for a two-day summit on where photography is at. Participants include Vince Aletti, George Baker, Walead Beshty, Jennifer Blessing, Charlotte Cotton, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Geoff Dyer, Peter Galassi, Corey Keller, Douglas Nickel, Trevor Paglen, Blake Stimson, and Joel Snyder.

Additional responses to the question and reports on the research project can be found on their blog, Open Space.

Below is the entire video recordings from the event, split up according to the various sessions held across the two days:

Day One, Part One

Topics broached - Anxiety about the future of photography. Do we need to talk about photography? Why do pictures mean something to us?

Day One, Part Two

Topics broached - Aspects of photography to be removed. Can we agree on what photography means? What has changed?



Day Two, Part One

Topics broached - History of image manipulation. Photographer or artist who uses photography? What if analogue photography becomes nothing more than a hobby?



Day Two, Part Two

Topics broached - What is contemporary? Issues of authorship. Responses of the gallery/museum to the changes in photography.




Day Two, Part Three

Topics broached - Overlapping use of still and moving image. Age of uncertainty? Size of prints and the art market. 

These videos were originally posted on SFMOMA's YouTube channel.