WINNERS OF SONY WORLD PHOTOGRAPHY AWARD AND KELLER AWARD ANNOUNCED
American photographer David Zimmerman won the top prize at the Sony World Photography Awards on Thursday for a series of landscape pictures of deserts in southwest America that he said were threatened by pollution, reports Reuters. Zimmerman was awarded twenty-five thousand dollars upon receiving the L’Iris D’Or Award at a ceremony in the southern French town of Cannes. “My documentation of these remarkable deserts throughout Arizona, New Mexico, California, and Nevada continues in an effort to influence preservation through public awareness, opinion, and action,” he said in a statement. Bruce Davidson of the honorary judging committee added that meaning and image coincided in the photographs. “We live in an era of environmental awareness,” said Davidson. “It is also an era of the image. Both can coexist to give us a sharper picture of the use and abuse of our deep oceans and beloved terra firma, which is far more at risk than we admit or know.”
In other news, the Helen Keller International Prize, set up in Scotland with funds donated by Helen Keller, has been awarded to an artist from the area in America where Keller herself grew up, reports the BBC. Rich Curtis, from the Shoals area of Alabama, was one of more than 150 artists who submitted work. His entry, Sight Unseen, received the twenty-two-hundred-dollar prize and a trophy at a special ceremony in Glasgow on Saturday. Curtis’s twenty textured paintings were designed to be felt as well as seen. He worked with various individuals from the Alabama Institute for the Deaf and Blind, playing them music and asking them to respond by drawing marks on paper.
Sense Scotland became trustees of the fund in 1989, transforming it first into an international essay competition and then into the current multimedia art competition. The competition is run biennially and is open to both professional and nonprofessional artists. Runners-up this year included a website called Dummy Jim by artist Matt Hulse from Scotland and Portrait 24_ by Jean Compton, also from Scotland.
