Winners of the Doug Moran National Portrait prize and the Moran Contemporary Photographic Prize were awarded last night in Sydney. The former is the prizes painting category. The Moran prize awards $80,000 to the wining photographer and $150,000 to the wining painter. This makes the Moran prize by far the wealthiest photography prize in Australia.
You can click on Dean Sewell's winning photo image above to view all 45 Moran finalist.
Yahoo news reports, "For the second consecutive year, Sydney photographer Dean Sewell was awarded first prize in the Open section of the Moran Contemporary Photographic Prize for his work titled Cockatoo Is. Ferry. He wins $80,000 for the black-and-white work, out of 45 photographs that made the final judging.All the works are on display in the Moran Prizes exhibition at the State Library of NSW until September 5. Entry is free."
Dean Sewell is a photojournalist and member of the Australian photography collective Oculi.
The photography judge for this years comp is the Australian photojournalist Stephen Dupont. You might remember his remarkable video account of his close call with a suicide bomb attack in Afghanistan (here).
The theme of the photos in the Moran comp is a portrait of life in Australia. Because of Stephen Dupont's background in photojournalism I kind of expected the 45 photo finalist in the open category to be dominated by gritty journalistic type photos. I was not disappointed as there were many photos with a strong reportage angle with about half of the finalist images being black and white images. But what I was most impressed with is how Stephen selected many images depicting quiet moments and photos with muted colors. Of course there are some exceptions to this, but in this day and age when peoples idea of contemporary photography means the photo must be shiny plastic, super saturated, digital imagery it's nice to see that the Moran finalists are a honest look at life in Australia.
The Moran awards have been around since 1988 and the photo prize was added in 2007. The photo prize is open to all photographers and has a student category as well. Photo subjects entered into the comp must be Australian and entry is only open to Australian citizens. They are now accepting entries for the 2011 prize.
That sounds awesome! I clicked the link to view the photos, and they are truly a work of art. Being a photographer is not that easy. You see, they are not always taking pictures of wonderful views and portraits. They also cover accidents, tragedies and turn it into a majestic artwork. But if you love your craft, everything you do is easy. That's why there are now tons of people who is now interested in doing photography.
Posted by: photography irving | February 13, 2011 at 11:39 PM