New Cosmos of Photography 2007 Tokyo Exhibition
Report on the open-committee meeting
Grand Prize selection open-committee meeting: Nov.9, 2007(Fri.)
A meeting, which was open to the public, of the selection committee that decides the Grand Prize winner of New Cosmos of Photography 2007 (the 30th competition) was held in a hall located on the first floor of the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography on November 9, 2007.
No one qualified for the Grand Prize winner 2007 (the 30th competition).
Co-Grand Prizes were presented to Megumi Kurosawa, Noriko Takuma, and Daisuke Nakashima.
The judges concluded after a heated discussion that no candidate satisfied the requirements for the Grand Prize. It is unfortunate that there was no Grand Prize winner.
We hope that the Grand Prize winners will do exactly what is expected of them, and there will be excellent entries for New Cosmos of Photography next year.
Overall Evaluation
General comments on the 30th competition
Nobuyoshi Araki
With photography, the best thing to do is look straight at the person, place, or situation you are photographing and just press the shutter without thinking about anything. By doing this, the power of the subject comes across, and this is the strength of the photographic genre. I feel that among recent submissions to the competition, perhaps too many have been mentally conceptualized beforehand, or suffered from the overuse of sophisticated camera functions.
Photographers should remind themselves of the basic truth that if the subject is not good, the photograph won’t be any good either. They need to take more of a hands-off approach, and focus on having encounters with things and people. So for this year’s competition, I chose works that gave me the impression that the photographer had done just that.
I didn’t feel that the submissions to this year’s competition were particularly different from those submitted at previous competitions. Even so, it’s a fact that the skill level is so high now that I just assume all the work I look at will demonstrate a high level of skill. This means that it’s pointless to pick winners and losers on the basis of skill alone. In addition, elaborately produced photographs that have been forced to incorporate some kind of drama inevitably turn out to be weak.
Photographs must depict things that are important in the lives of the individuals who take them. Photographs that show you that the photographer got wet, sweated, or was breathing heavily can often move the viewer. It’s good to be honest and straightforward towards both your subject and your own feelings.
Kotaro Iizawa
My overall impression was that while this year’s submissions might have been a bit more subdued than those in other years, the quality was by no means lower. However, I didn’t really feel that I was witnessing any major changes in current trends. As usual, many of the submissions depicted fragments of daily life. Such submissions are potentially risky, as the judges might just write them off with a curt: “Here we go again.” This time, however, some entrants had turned such pictures into calendars or contact prints, or used other innovative techniques. This made me feel that there is still a wealth of possibilities for displaying such pictures.
Having been held dozens of times, the New Cosmos of Photography has, in a good sense, begun to mature. I think we’re at the stage now where straightforward snaps that haven’t had anything done to them will no longer do.
Although one of the special features of this contest is that there are no restrictions on the formats of submissions or the number of photographs they contain, entrants should be careful not to overdo it. A lot of the submissions made me think that entrants should practice using just a few powerful photographs to deliver their message clearly. One way they can help themselves do this is by setting a personal limit on the number of photographs they can include.
We’re also seeing an increase in the number of submissions that are influenced by modern art. Many of them make use of very subtle techniques, and are of high quality. It seems that Japanese photographers are good at making surfaces look beautiful and achieving ever higher levels of perfection. If they can also find ways of incorporating what they want to say into their work, I think their work can go to an even higher level.
Fumio Nanjo
One trend with recent submissions is that they have become more and more varied. For example, as well as documentary-style work comprising photographs of back streets, we’re now getting a lot of constructed photos depicting scenes the photographers have themselves created. The techniques used with these works are quite refined, making them more than just straightforward, artificial creations. I’ve seen fictional work made to look like documentary work, the opposite (i.e. documentary work made to look like fictional work), and work that blurs the boundary between fiction and documentary.
It seems as though the belief that photographs have to be documentaries is fading. We now see photographs that dart about somewhere between a story created by the photographer and the form of the subject itself. Such work really makes you feel as though you are drifting in that realm between truth and fiction.
Perhaps related to this is the fact that many photographers incorporated numerous viewpoints within a single work. Works that strongly urge the viewer to “look at me this way” are good too, but I feel that works that have meaning on multiple levels, and that can be looked at in various ways, also represent one form of richness.
Works submitted in album format were often of particularly high quality. A lot of thought had gone into many of the submissions, even ones from young people. The more submissions we receive like these, the harder it will be for us to select winners, though I hope we do if only because it is such a pleasure to look at them.
Daido Moriyama
A few works really stood out for me, but I felt as though the top ten entrants could have produced all of the hundreds of other works thatwere submitted. They just all seemed so similar.
A photograph is essentially a device for producing faithful representations of objects, so some degree of similarity is only to be expected.
And a sensitivity for the times we live in comes out in all the works, so I can’t even say that similarity is a bad thing. Nevertheless, the entire body of work submitted gives the impression not of rocks of all shapes and sizes scattered all over the place, but rather of rows and rows of tiles. The photographs were well taken and well organized, and the
editing skills of the photographers are of a high standard, yet there weren’t many works that got beyond this and featured something that really stood out.
I’d like the entrants to experiment more, be more adventurous, even to the point of letting themselves run wild. I want to feel things that come from the desires of the individual entrants. I think that trying to make the pictures look good, or trying to take cool pictures, is really of secondary importance. Exposing one’s desires is admittedly quite difficult, but if you don’t do it, you won’t produce work that stands out from all the rest.
Ryoichi Enomoto
In the past I was involved with events such as the “Nippon Graphic Exhibition” and “Urbanart,” so I’ve had a lot of opportunities to view photographs alongside work from other expressive genres. As a result, I’ve always been aware of how interesting the power that photographs possess is.
Examining so many works for this competition, I felt that some were overflowing with life while some captured quiet scenes. There were works from both these extremes. Of these two extremes, I ended up selecting only works that depicted situations without any people in them. This was because I felt that photographs that were empty, lacking in life, and focused on artificial spaces better reflected the meaning of the era we live in.
It might seem a bit strange that so few digitally processed photographs made it into my final selection, but I felt that with photographs realism is extremely important. If you modify a picture too much using digital technology, the real elements fade away, and you can end up losing the very things that photographs are supposed to be recording.
But, it’s OK to keep making an effort in this area. I think that those who use photographs to express themselves comprise photographers and photo-artists. I would like to see what kinds of things the photo-artist types can create by distancing themselves from realism, so it’s a pity that I didn’t come across any submissions that allowed me to do this.
Bohnchang Koo
Although I have been a judge in photography competitions before,this was the first time I have reviewed such a huge number of submissions. The fact that the entrants are free to choose any formatfor their submissions makes things pretty difficult for the judges. It’s nice to be able to see so much variety, but comparing an entire portfoliowith a single blown-up print, for example, was by no means easy.
Perhaps because of that, when I’d finished looking at all the submissions I was left feeling that I’d come into contact with an incredible variety of styles. In particular, I felt that the level of perfection of many of the works in book format was high.
Japan already boasts a large number of distinguished photographers, and these people have established something that could be described as a Japanese style of photography. Looking at the submissions, I felt that this Japanese style was being maintained and passed on to the next generation of photographers. I felt as though I had been able to confirm that this is the way that traditions are created.
As a member of the South Korean photography community, I suppose I’m envious in a way of the fact that such a massive public competition as this exists over here. South Korea also has a lot of young people who aspire to become photographers, but I strongly felt that Japan is doing more to reach out to and support people with a love of photography.
