Photography News Issue 62

Photography News | Issue 62 | photographynews.co.uk

Interview 20

60 of the very best Exhibitions Masters of Print is an innovative exhibition concept which aims to showcase the best photography from UK enthusiasts, and just 60 images get displayed. The PAGB’s RodWheelans tells us all about it

interviewby Ann Healey ARPS

Photograhy News: What is the Masters of Print exhibition all about? Rob Wheelans: The exhibition came about because two things came together at the same time: Clifford Burt approached us at the The Photography Show at the NEC and offered us the use of his London gallery, and the PAGB at that time decided it needed to do something to encourage the printing of photographs rather than projected images. We decided we would run an exhibition of the very best of amateur photography within the UK, just 60 prints by 60 different photographers. This is the second year the Masters of Print Exhibition has been run; we originally thought it might only run once but now it looks like it could be an annual event. PN: Did you decide to make it an annual event because of the interest and the quality of the prints you selected? RW: It was mainly because of the popularity of the first competition; we got a lot of entries from a lot of photographers. PN: How many people entered the first exhibition and how many this time? RW: We got different entrants this year but around the same number – 300 – which is a little fewer than we hoped for; we hoped that number would be higher for the second year. There were quite a number of good photographers and printers who didn’t enter for one reason or another. I’ve talked to quite a lot of people about it. Many thought it would be too difficult, above their standard and they wouldn’t have any chance of being accepted but if you look around the accepted entries, you’ll see a lot of lesser-known names, people who you haven’t heard of or seen their work in exhibitions before. With 300 entrants and 60 acceptances, that’s quite a high proportion of acceptance. We were hoping for maybe 600 entrants but even so, that would still be one in ten. Quite a number of those people have now told me that they will be entering next year.

RW: No, the selection was easy. It’s a two-stage judging process: we get a panel of three judges to score in the usual exhibition style (two to five points on a push button basis), and then we have a Masters of Print Selection Committee that selects the prints for the exhibition. This is obviously based on the judges’ scores but, for example, one photographer might have had scores of 15 but he or she can only have one acceptance; so sometimes wemight look at the highest scores and think, ‘we’ve seen that sort of picture before’, so we’ll see if there’s a 14 or 13 score by the same person and if it’s good enough, we’ll put that in instead. We are not choosing the pictures because we personally like them – we are looking at the high-scoring pictures and trying to ensure diversity. As it’s only one print per photographer, we have to find the most suitable one from that person and then we might say ‘well, we’ve got three portraits already so we have to find something else from this person, not a portrait,’ for example.

PN: So it’ll be tougher next year? RW: I hope so!

PN: How many prints did you get last year in comparison to this year? RW: Well, almost everybody who entered submitted the maximum five prints, so there were around 1500 prints to choose from. The same number of prints was entered this year as last year. About half the entry this year was colour prints, more than half of the remainder were monochrome and the smallest category was nature. Because Masters of Print has three categories, we decided we would divide the selection equally, rather than choose it pro rata based on entry numbers in each section. This meant a proportionately slightly higher number of nature prints was selected, although not quite the full third. PN: Was it a tough job making the selection?

If you look around the accepted entries, you’ll see a lot of lesser- known names, people you haven’t heard of