Laurie Snyder, Prize Judge
Laurie Sieverts Snyder (BFA, Cornell University; MFA, Syracuse University) has taught photography and artist books at Cornell, Syracuse University, Ithaca College and Tompkins Cortland Community College. In 1993, she moved to Baltimore to teach photography at the Maryland Institute College of Art, where she was Chairman of the Photography Department from 2008 to 2014. She has exhibited widely, including the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian Museum.
First Prize $200
The term “scrum” comes from rugby. The players pile up on each other to try regain control of the ball. It looks like a sweaty battle. This photo frightened me with its intensity, but also seemed a metaphor for these fraught times. When I searched the word “scrum”, I found that it also refers to “scrum software designed to facilitate Agile project management”. Does it solve sweaty problems? An intense photo taught me several new concepts!
This poignant photo, small in size, subdued in hue, tugged at my heart. A child’s dress, suspended from the clothes line, with the title implying a memory of childhood, a loss of innocence.
Third Prize $200
This complex photo forces the viewer to look closely, finding ever more details to imply a narrative: the man in the interior, working on his laptop with a book next to him titled “Matriarch”, while on the outside of the building a very young person is pushing a stroller, presumably with a baby in it. The other man in the coffee shop has a Luis Vuitton bag (for himself? Or for an important friend?) behind his laptop on his table. The street is a cacophony of signs, vehicles, bicycles, rushing people. Is this the beginning of a film?
Honorable Mention $100
This photo is a puzzle. The elegant couple, with food on plates, standing in a spacious barn, and in the background, a coffin? Is the photographer implying that the couple is nearing the end of their life? Why would there be a coffin, maybe more than one, in a barn? The warm tones of the image are not frightening, yet the story is never clarified.
Honorable Mention $100
This magnificent image blasts the viewer with color and shapes. Utterly jagged, kaleidoscope of colors, the viewer turns to the wall label for clarification: magnesium nitrate hexahydrate. The photographer shows us what we cannot see without extreme magnification.
Honorable Mention $100
Here is another image that teaches us something that we cannot know or understand without exaggerated magnification. The coupling moths are exquisite in detail, hue, and composition. For me, luna moths used to be a familiar sight of summer nights, now they seem rare.
Honorable Mention $100
This cyanotype diptych combines two images on cloth: on the left is a rib cage/lung and on the right is an enigmatic diagram. The image on the right is labeled “Porifera”.
This word again sent me to the internet: “Porifera is a biological phylum of simple, aquatic invertebrate animals that includes sea sponges. They are among the most primitive multicellular animals on earth.” Now I am left to wonder why the artist put these two images side by side. I liked that she stitched the two images to the paper.