Competitions
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BELOWMeda portrait by Tomas Januska. RIGHT Baptism ceremony of an artisan fishing boat by Paulo Monteiro. BOTTOM Julia II by Atanassov Lubomir.
Who were your judges and how did they go about narrowing down the submissions to just one winner? Wehave a very closepartnershipwithphotography personalities at schools and university lecturers, famous photographers, technical experts selling analogue images and the press. Every country where Tetenal has its own subsidiary chose their jury and every person we asked whether they would like to support us was very happy to do so. We felt very honoured that F C Gundlach, one of the most important fashion photographers of West Germany’s early post-war period, supported us in our jury for the final voting. The voting procedure itself was very, very difficult as we received so many wonderful pictures. So, we started in our first sessions country by country. Then, we voted for the category winner to get it down to just five images to then vote for the country winner. The final voting session was to judge, from 11 countries, the top five European champions. What do you think the future is for black & white analogue photography? It will remain a niche market, as a tradition and craft that everyone can have fun with. The process of seeing your pictures emerge in the darkroom will always fascinate. Do you have any plans for exhibiting the winning images? We are actually thinking about printing a catalogue initially and are thinking about hosting a gallery exhibition too. Will you run the competition again? No doubt, we will certainly go ahead with the next Tetenal Awards. We aim to be ready in autumn 2015 – so, we will come back!
level, but our jury was too. We are very happy about this renaissance! Also, looking at the professional photographers who are our customers as well, we feel that some of them are offering their customers analogue, silver halide images reflecting high-end pictures and a certain unique status as these are not the kind of prints you will get anywhere. In Germany, even some photo stores are now thinking about installing their own darkroom in order to offer workshops and photo events. What about the entrants themselves, do you know much about who submitted images to the competition? From the launch of our award in September at Photokina until today – even when we closed at the end of March – we were extremely pleased by the feedback of so many people in Europe but also those abroad asking whether we will be able to open our European Award up to a worldwide competition. So, we opened it as “add-on” in January 2015 and picked up some new b&w fans, for instance in Alaska and Hong Kong. Many entrants gave us information about the image itself, how they developed it etc. In some cases we even received additional handwritten letters. So much time invested in b&w photography, which we appreciated very much as it shows us how ambitious they are – as we are too. Thank you all so much for your input, it’s been fantastic! You received just over 1000 entries which is impressive indeed. Did you expect such a positive response? Well, to be honest, my personal challenge was to get 500 entries. I never thought about reaching 1189 images, which is the number that we finally received. That’s fantastic for the technique itself, for b&w darkroom work, and most certainly for us at Tetenal.
The first prize in the portrait category of the competition in Germany went to a school in Munich where the students had actually built themselves a pinhole camera. Isn’t that amazing! Not only were we at Tetenal completely surprised by such an engagement on a very high quality
Many entrants gave us information about the image itself… Somuch time invested in b&wphotography, whichwe appreciated verymuch as it showhow ambitious they are – aswe are too
π To find out more, go to since1847.tetenal.com.
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Issue 21 | Photography News
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