Winners of All About Photo's AAP Magazine #18 B&W competition
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All About Photo's AAP Magazine recently announced the winners for their #18 – B&W competition. The 25 winners come from 13 countries. Amongst the winners and merited images are portraits, landscapes, and visual narratives. 'When you photograph people in color, you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in black and white, you photograph their souls,' famous Canadian photojournalist, who is not affiliated with the competition, famously stated.
The top three winners received cash prizes amounting to $1,000. Besides the online gallery, all winners and finalists will have their images published in the print issue of AAP Magazine #18 B&W.
1st Place Winner: 'Foxy, Los Angeles, California' Donald Graham (USA)
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About this Image: 'Foxy, Los Angeles, California' is featured in Donald Graham’s new book. “One Of A Kind" is the first major publication of Donald Graham's haunting and powerful black and white images of artists, holy men, political figures. celebrities, and unknown people whose lives are one of a kind.
2nd Place Winner: 'God gives and God takes Away' by Angelika Kollin (USA)
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The series You are my Mother is a meditation on emotional intimacy between a mother and child and its effect on our adult life. Its a silent poem, a slow gaze past a veil of busy modern life into landscapes of human emotions and our inherent capacity to love and give tenderness. It's a visit to a place where we are not separated by age, religion, race, or our political view.
3rd place winner: 'Making Plans for “l’Aventure” or “the Backway”' Andrea Borgarello
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About this Series: Notes on Migration is a long-term project that aims to shed further light on the migration process from West Africa to Europe. From 2017 to 2020, I collected and recorded hundreds of migration testimonies during public debates as well as during individual talks. Hence, I associated these voices to faces, daily activities and personal life-stories in the local community.
This work represents an attempt of visual anthropology to describe a migrant as a person who feeds his/her long term expectations with the “elsewhere”, which eventually becomes an integral part of the “here”. Every migrant, before being a migrant, is a human being who, at a certain point, decides to bet on his/her own life. This is why, I depicted the story of a “migrant” by combining multiple testimonies on the “journey”, with a visual expression of the daily life in West Africa: the visual and the text become two superimposed layers of the same storytelling.
So far, this material has been part of a more comprehensive project that includes a multimedia documentary and a book (in progress). The testimony associated to the following picture which has been shot in Senegal is one of the rule of the migrant's journey: "They never say «you leave tomorrow», you will never know that. For the clandestine departure, from the beginning until the end, it is on the same day.” (Hady, remigrant from Guinea-Conakry).
Merit Award: 'The Gatekeeper' by David Dhaen (Belgium)
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About this Image: This image is taken when i was strolling through the famous rock-cut church of Lalibela, in the Amhara region of Ethiopia. I saw this kind man as an impressive appearance that completely matched the scenery. A smile appeared to his face when I showed him this image on my camera.
Merit Award: 'Agnes' by Jacque Rupp (USA)
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About this Image: Agnes drove her 3 young children across the country at the beginning of the war. No interstates, no maps, just sheer determination. Outliers is a project that explores the roots of my feminine strength and feelings of disconnection using mid-century archival photographs.
Merit Award: 'The Storm is Coming' by Alexej Sachov (Ukraine)
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About this Image: Most of the wave photographs are taken above water from a shore.
This series was taken on scuba dives, requiring a lot of safety precautions. The photos depict the similarity between the world above and underwater. When humans would start to see those similarities and love both worlds deeply and equally, there would be still a chance of preventing more environmental pollution and harm inflicted to animals and nature.
Merit Award: 'URBAN SPRAWL EMPTINESS, Night' by Emmanuel Monzon (France/USA)
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About this Image: Through my urban sprawl series, I want to photograph the in-between state found in the American landscape. So I capture places of transition, borders, passages from one world to another: am I leaving a city or entering a new environment?
If I could sum up the common theme of my photos, it would be about emptiness, about silence. My pictures try to extract from the mundane urban landscape a form of estheticism.
When I am working on a black & white series, what is important for me is that the color black must be truly black and that the color white must be truly white. To be more precise, the black and white play important roles in photography, and I use them to create the atmosphere that I desire. I mostly do black and white photos during the night, because I think the black and white contrast more during the night. Generally, it is in these conditions that a unique atmosphere can be created.
Merit Award: 'Man with Cigar' by Jon Wollenhaupt (USA)
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About this Series: This series documents a second line parade, which is an element of a jazz funeral procession that is composed of two parts: The main or “first line” that includes the parade leader, the brass band and the krewe or club with which the band is affiliated, and members of the funeral party. The “second line” is made up of spectators—friends of the deceased, neighbors, and even tourist—who follow the main line dancing, partying, and reveling in the moving spectacle. A second line often give the appearance of a being block party on the move.
The second line I documented took place in the historic Faubourg Tremé—one of oldest African American neighborhoods in the U.S. and home to Congo Square, an area where enslaved blacks were allowed to congregate on Sundays to play music and sell goods. The Tremé is the birthplace of jazz and is considered the most culturally influential neighborhood in New Orleans. Famous residents of the include Buddy Bolden, Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews, and anti-segregation activist Homer Adolph Plessy.
Merit Award: 'Flat Iron Under Renovation' by Emmanuelle Becker (France)
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About this Image: Gothic Visions is a portfolio of black and white photographs that depict surreal and unsettling urban landscapes. The absence of human beings in these highly cinematic images contributes to the sense of exclusion and isolation that envelops the viewer. Expressionistic lighting, strange perspectives and tense compositions contribute to create a psychological unease, as enigmatic stories seem to unfold behind the windows of empty buildings.
Architectural details appear in sharp relief against the threatening environmental conditions: stormy skies, ominous shadows and clouds and sultry vapor add to the prevailing sense of suspense in these moody images.
Merit Award: 'Construction Art I' by Klaus Lenzen (Germany)
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About this Image: Also in everyday life you can discover works of art. In my series "construction art" I've tried to show everyday scenes of a construction site in an artistic, minimalist way.
Merit Award: 'Firefighters Work to Extinguish a House Fire in Rural North Carolina, USA, 2019' by Jefferson Lankford (USA)
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About the Series: The American South has an essence that sparingly reveals itself, thus requiring unprecedented determination and patience to photograph all its splendor. Nevertheless, and despite its elusiveness, this essence I am chasing - permeates; it lingers in the air of North Carolina, and when discovered, puts on a magnificent display.
Over the past three years, I have traveled throughout many impoverished towns and across countless acres of farmland to document and share an original story of existence - life and death as it occurs in rural North Carolina. This photograph represents a glimpse of my long-term ongoing project, To Be, Rather Than to Seem — _which provides a window for others to witness these fleeting moments for themselves and to embrace the beautiful raw essence of my homeland.
Merit Award: 'Yankee Stadium - 2005' by Michael Ruggiero, Jr.
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About this Image: This image was taken at old Yankee Stadium’s in its final days. Everyone and everything has significance in itself and in relationship to its surroundings. I am always looking for that feeling of harmony between a scene’s geometry and its emotional contents.
Merit Award: 'Children in Nam Cuong' by Tuan Nguyen Tan (Vietnam)
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About this Image: Children in Nam Cuong play with old tires on the sand dunes. This is a big sand dune in central Vietnam and very hot. The children here use old tires to make toys on the sand dunes after returning from school every afternoon.
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