The 'Blur' Baker's Dozen Prizes

As announced, we're giving away three top prizes for the Blur Baker's Dozen, chosen by a guest judge, Hugh Crawford. (The full portfolio, if you missed it, is here.)

The prizes are:

$200 for First;
$125 for Second; and
$75 for Third.

Hugh mentioned to me that he wanted to wait a while after the contest ended and the thirteen pictures were presented, so that he could see which pictures he remembered the most after some time had passed. I'll turn it over to Hugh:

Photo by Alan Sailer

"Number one is the photograph by Alan Sailer. Not only is it a wonderful-looking photograph but it’s the one that I remember the most which counts for something. This photograph seems to be all about motion and light and presumably air; there’s a figure, there’s maybe a horizon so maybe it’s outside, but the light seems like it’s mixed; from there your mind fills in all the details. It sure seems like there’s some sort of a story going on, but it’s left to the viewer to just sort of make it up."

Photo by Francis Sullivan

"Number two is Francis Sullivan’s photo. There’s all sorts of formal stuff going on. First, there’s a lot of calligraphic paint stuff going on, two big gestures, the Pink Floyd text, and where somebody wiped the light-colored paint off their hands onto the wall. One of the things I always love about looking at Jackson Pollock's paintings is decoding the order in which they were painted, by what colors and drips overlap sequentially in a story of its creation. Here you can see that the sort of smeared area just above the running figure was probably painted first, along with the Pink Floyd, which seems to be very much aping the cover art for their album 'The Wall.' Of course Gerald Scarfe renders Pink Floyd in upper case and the anonymous graffitist presumably walked up to this wall and said, 'Oh look, it’s a wall. I think I’ll write Pink Floyd on it' without referring to the original artwork and chose mixed case which is absolutely fine. Later, somebody uses a brush to put up an arc of dark paint on the wall, it looks like it is just a pint or so of paint thrown against the wall, but you can see that there are brush marks in it, and paint is dripping from it, so it was fairly considered. Also, you get a sense of how tall the person was because it has the gesture of somebody extending their arm up as high as they can to paint with a little bit of an arc and walking simultaneously. Later after that dried and somebody did something similar with some light-colored paint and you can see where it is dripping down over the dried darker paint. Oh, and I can’t forget those light handprints up above Pink Floyd. Really this is more Shinichi Maruyama or Richard Hambleton than Jackson Pollock.

"So anyway, you’ve got this palimpsest of layered narrative and revisions that probably accreted over a few months. At this point, Francis Sullivan happens by, chooses a shutter speed appropriate for capturing masonry, and a kid with a bow runs through the frame—Time’s Arrow being too fleeting to be captured itself, but the hand of time is frozen. Pretty neat how random chance turns this into an allegory for the passage of time of both long and short duration. On a formal note, the arcs of the black and of the white paint are echoed by the curve of the bow. I would be remiss in not mentioning that this reminds me of William Klein’s work, which is a very good thing."

Photo by Kristine Hinrichs

"The third photograph is the one by Kristine Hinrichs. It reminds me of Robert Capa’s 11 D-Day photographs on Omaha Beach. There were lots of other photographs taken on Omaha Beach that don’t have the technical issues of Capa’s photographs and look like they were taken on a beach in June in nice weather. But which do we remember?"

I'll be contacting the winners to send them their prizes. Congratulations to Alan, Francis, and Kristine; grateful thanks to Hugh. Thanks to the generous donors of the prize money, and to the others photographers whose pictures were included in the portfolio. Last, but not least, thanks to the hundreds of readers who sent in submissions. This was a fun one, and I hope you enjoyed it. With any luck, the idea of "blur" stuck in your mind for a while as a possibility when you were out photographing.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Comments

[Roger Bradbury]

Worthy winners indeed!

[Mike Stone]

Three great images. I spent a lot of energy in times past trying to incorporate blur into my personal work. I think it adds a wonderful space for the viewer to overlay their own narrative. Will be interesting to work on this again, thank you for the prompt.

[Lothar Adler]

To my own surprise, I am very surprised at how much I like and am impressed by the first 3 images with "Blur" and I say that as, unfortunately, a very technically oriented photographer. I am equally impressed with the very insightful and knowledgeable texts by Hugh Crawford that provide an extension of the images on a linguistic level.
Why am I so joyfully surprised by these first 3 images?
Because they do justice to photography as a creative medium, proving in a breezy, light and playful way that the medium of photography has much more to offer than the far too often boring and paralyzing limitation to documentation. Not to mention the fetishes for technical perfection that often are whispered to us by the photo industry, mostly for self-serving reasons.
We all know that photographic technology can lead to technically perfect images since a long time, - so what?
That can't and shouldn't be the end of photography,- after all, it's only from this point on that photography has the potential to reach new, independent pictorial shores.
Thank you for the creative "Blur" idea and thank you for the visual and linguistic realizations.

[Kurt Kramer]

I hope you're going to post the other 10 that made up the Baker's Dozen with the 3 winners.

[Already did that...

https://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2023/05/bakers-dozen-the-blur-portfolio.html

--Mike]