Twin Brothers Tulsi and Basant, Great Famous Circus, Calcutta, India, 1989:
[Photo: Mary Ellen Mark]
Photographer Mary Ellen Mark is the recipient of the 2014 Sony World Photography Awards' Outstanding Contribution to Photography, and features as part of the Sony World Photography Awards Exhibition now showing at Somerset House.
You can see a brief slideshow of her work here.
It's instructive to compare an "old school" photographer like Mark (she's now 74) to the younger prize winners. Mark's photos need only a title: they speak for themselves. By contrast, here's Matthew Baum, 3rd place in the Landscapes category:
Overlook is a record of places visited on road trips through the US. Through making these pictures, I reflect on questions of memory – both personal and collective – as well as the ways people assign meaning to place. The work also considers the complex relationship between pictorial and physical space, particularly within the triptych/panoramic format. The collapse of three dimensions onto two and the formal relationships that are established between the panels creates an image that is oddly abstract, yet somehow remains faithful to the physical and emotional experience of those moments.
Or Amanda Harman, Ist place in Still Life, with some pleasant but unremarkable pictures of a garden:
A series of accidental still lives, made around the glasshouses, potting sheds and scullery of a country house. The images seek to make visible the unseen work of the gardeners. The settings depicted and revealed in these photographs refer to worldly processes: the inferred eventual death of the plant alludes to our own. These images speak softly, of the ordinariness in the extra ordinary: conception, birth, life, ageing, and death.
The photographs merely form an accompaniment here to the verbal (and indigestible) main course.
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