NYAB Event - "Winners of Soho Photo's Seventh Annual Alternative Processes Competition" Exhibition

"Winners of Soho Photo's Seventh Annual Alternative Processes Competition" Exhibition

Soho Photo Gallery

This event has ended.

Soho Photo presents that its November show will feature the winning entries in the Seventh Annual Alternative Processes Competition as well as a guest exhibition by Stephanie Lyn Slate that features two bodies of work, Souvenirs and The Inevitable. This year's Alternative Processes Competition presents the winning images of photographers from across the United States. The images that were submitted for this competition represent a wide range of alternative methods that can include beeswax paper negative, Cyanotype, Van Dyke Brown, platinum/palladium, gum dichromate, gold toned salt print, tintype, and ziatype. This year's juror was gallerist, educator and photographer Michael Paris Mazzeo. As an educator, Mazzeo has long been a practitioner of antiquarian processes; he's taught at the School of Visual Arts, ICP, New Jersey City University, the Center for Photography at Woodstock, and the Pennsylvania College of Art and Design.

The top three winners are:

First Place: Barbara Ciurej & Lindsay Lochman, Chicago, IL
Second Place: Denyse Murphy, Haverhill, MA
Third Place: David Zimmerman, Taos, NM

After judging all the entries, Mazzeo issued a statement, an excerpt of which follows: He said, "My criteria for selecting work for this exhibition included technical proficiency, compelling imagery, and consistency of vision. I looked for work that was intelligent, thoughtful, engaging, entertaining, humorous and challenging, devoid of kitsch, cliché, and the obvious. Above all, my priority was to reward those artists whose work communicated distinct ideas through the effective use of their chosen process.

My top choice was Barbara Ciurej & Lindsay Lochman's exquisite portraits of elderly women adorned with botanical specimens by way of Cyanotype photograms. An elegant elegy to old age and the passage of time, this work also nicely references Anna Atkins, an English botanist and the first recognized female photographer, who is credited with publishing the first book of photographic illustrations, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions.

Denyse Murphy's Polaroid emulsion transfers of flowers were my second choice, but not until I realized that these flowers were actually fashioned from arterial images of her mother's cardiac stent procedure. This is another smart match of process and concept, a veritable bouquet of contemporary floral images reminiscent of Irving Penn's flowers, and a fitting tribute to the artist's mother.

David Zimmerman's landscapes were my third choice. These prints avoid the traditional characteristics of the platinum/palladium process, namely rich dark shadows and long tonal scale, in favor of a high key, almost mirage-like quality suggesting the extreme conditions of the desert." Mazzeo's entire statement is available at http://www.sohophoto.com/alternative_processes_comp.html