Best Portrait
Native Expressions of the Soul
Photographer: Jeremiah O-C Jahi
Genres: Portrait
Date Taken: May 18, 2022
Country of Origin: United States
Camera: Canon 70D
Lens: 50mm
Focal Length: 34.00mm
Shutter Speed: 1/125
Aperture: 4.5
ISO / Film: 1600
Artist Statement: Let’s be honest, Black boys from poor working class neighborhoods don’t often dream of storytelling as a sensible way to make a living in the world. At best plans are to hopefully, graduate from high school, possibly go to the military, maybe learn a trade or just get a job. For those Black boys that were dreamers, they would add going to college to their options. Whatever the route, they all have one end goal, which was employment that would lead to a higher probability of job security and benefits. Growing up in post civil rights era Atlanta, I followed the zeitgeist. I joined the Marine Corps, I worked a number of odd jobs and eventually went to college. I soon found out that following the zeitgeist wouldn’t be enough to satisfy my desires to want more out of life.
The majority of my formalized training in the arts has been as an actor, but more and more I am accepting the fact that I am an artist, who is in love with acting and writing and is growing to love photography and filmmaking. At core, I realize all three areas lead to my full passion, which is storytelling. Although not limited to, I mainly write stories and take pictures about the lives of Black people who are a part of the working poor. These stories and characters simply walk into my mind community, find the creative house, enter it and locate which bedroom they want to reside in. Once in their rooms, some stories and characters hibernate immediately, but let it be known that they are in the right place, but just aren’t ready to fully speak yet. Others refuse to hibernate, as if their only mission is to disturb my creative house in a way to force me to hear them and speak for them. They make their presence known immediately through their politics, their way of dress, pains and joys, wins and losses, their challenges and triumphs, or just through their loud silence.
On the page, I hear the Black people of my southern roots of Atlanta (and rural Georgia), as well as the Black people of my adult years living in Brooklyn. I allow myself the space to be as Black as I want to be. Even beyond the always exhausting, ever present, and penetrating point of view of those Black people who often think they have a monopoly on what the Black experience in America is or should be. The page and the camera is where I seek to be big and small, comfortable and uncomfortable, as well as intimate about how I see the world through the ever changing Black lenses.
I am a traditional man, so often I lean towards traditional storytelling structures, which means I like honest and simple storytelling that cuts through to the fabric of what it is to be human in the everyday sense, as it relates to love, messy relationships (of all kinds), employment concerns, and basic survival as a chess piece on the human experimental chess board, called life. My style of storytelling across genres will always include some bell hooks, August Wilson, Cornel West, Al Green, Son House, Public Enemy and Ray Bradbury, along with a healthy dose of the Black prophetic tradition, for as the scriptures say,”If these should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out.” That’s the blues of blues people, from which I speak about in my storytelling as an artist.
Reclamation
Photographer: Lowell Hutcheson
Date Taken: June 8, 2022
Country of Origin: United States
Artist Statement: Reclamation is a self-portrait series documenting a woman’s journey to find wisdom and solace in nature as her rights are stripped away by the United States government.
Bound to Grow
Photographer: Christie Goldstein
Country of Origin: United States
Artist Statement: I started reading when I was 4. I had a voracious appetite for the words that formed music, poems, plays, and novels. Growing up, I wanted to be a librarian by day and author by night. (Maybe…also… Wonder Woman.) Words hold a certain power. They have the ability to hurt, heal, hinder, and help, but the real power in words is how they are interpreted. At many key moments in my life, I failed to communicate what I needed to say because I couldn’t find the words that seemed powerful enough to encompass my thoughts and feelings. I was often misunderstood. However, with my camera; my voice, my thoughts finally found an outlet.
My photographic approach is to try and capture movement or color in a way that creates a visceral response from the viewer when seeing a subject captured in this way. I want to draw the viewer in to the visual story that unfolds when I use my camera to seek out the essence of my subjects. Stories breathe life into images and forge connections to art in a way that still fills me with awe.
Best Fine Art
Duality-
Photographer: Katayoun Afrooz
Date Taken: December 22, 2020
Country of Origin: United States
Camera: EOS SD MARK IV
Lens: EF24-105mm
Focal Length: 50mm
Shutter Speed: 1/60
Aperture: f/5.0
ISO / Film: 800
Artist Biography: Katayoun Afrooz is an Iranian visual artist and filmmaker, photographer. Katayoun undertook her formal education and training in film and visual arts in the United States. She holds a MFA in filmmaking and visual arts from Columbia college . Furthermore, she studied filmmaking and video art under critically-acclaimed Iranian film director Abbas Kiarostami.
Spending half of her life in the east and half in the west, Katayoun main concern is women identity & sexuality, human experience and above all the notion of one ‘s self. which she is exploring through moving images.
Currently based in California, Katayoun continued focusing on making films, photography and video art projects.
Réalité Masquée
Photographer: Yan Berthemy
Genres: Art, Political, Fiction
Date Taken: December 16, 2020
Country of Origin: France
Camera: Phase One IQ150
Lens: Schneider Kreuznach 55mm LS f/2.8
Focal Length: 55mm
Shutter Speed: 1/100
Aperture: f/5
Description: A young girl who seems lost, locked in a room, blindfolded, in the middle of a pile of masks… The symbolism reminds us of the fact that we are blind to the future of the pandemic situation and that we don’t know how many masks we’ll have to wear to end it. The heaps of masks are the days that pass, we advance, we crawl, we search, without knowing a real way out.
LES ABANDONS
Photographer: Benjamin Juhel
Country of Origin: France
Artist Statement: Benjamin Juhel uses the societal functions or images of cities to re-examine our relationships with representations, to the society of spectacle and consumption, and to the fabrication of power. Without wanting to denounce, he invites us to question by creating poetic situations and images where the time of night brings silence and solitude. Benjamin Juhel offers images with textures and lights close to painting and cinematography. The darkness of images invites to contemplation, to take the time to discover what is being shown, leaving the time for the eye to catch the details that appear when our eye gets used to shades of black.
Best Nature
Ape Behavior
Photographer: Julia Anne Momtazee
Genres: Animals
Country of Origin: United States
Camera: NIKON D800
Lens: 70.0-200.0 mm f/2.8
Description: Animals, especially apes, are more aware of the world around them than we give them credit for. Animals often display behavior that has been coined as “human” when their species may have existed before ours, so the behavior isn’t necessarily human at all, it is just their own. Nevertheless, I wanted to highlight the similarities between animals and humans to bring awareness to the mistreatment of animals, whether it be the pollution of their habitat or keeping them in inhumane conditions.
Lost in Ocean
Photographer: Tati Golykh
Date Taken: October 4, 2022
Country of Origin: United States
Shutter Speed: 1/640
Aperture: f/5.6
ISO / Film: 50
Best Phone Photography
Moroccan Art
Photographer: Salah Eddine Saadouni
Date Taken: January 1, 2022
Country of Origin: Morocco
Camera: Samsung A31
Lens: 35mm
Description: Moroccan art is a concept of images that have been taken with a camera phone to justify that art it can be done with the simple options we have and to avoid the idea of being afraid of creating good content, by Saadouni Salah Eddine started his career by learning the art of the image and the basics after being fascinated by the art cinematic, in particular the making of films. After obtaining a diploma in audiovisual on April 14, 2019, he opened up to the activities of social networks and created an Instagram account of cultural images when presenting an artistic photo linked by quotes that explain the scene.
