Friday 10 August 2012

My portfolio has been chosen AGAIN as part of 100 Curators 100 Days Project, this time by Didier Damiani, Luxemburg

Thursday 2 August 2012

2012 Daylight Photo Award, juror's pick: Ula Wiznerowicz, Behind the Curtain


I am so pleased I was selected as a juror's pick of the 2012 Daylight Portfolio Award.
CDS Publishing and Awards Director Alexa Dilworth describes what drew her attention as she made her way through hundreds of portfolios submitted for the 2012 Daylight Photo Awards, and what distinguished the body of work she ultimately chose: 

In the end, I could only go with the portfolio that drew me in the most, that compelled me to consider it the longest, with utmost attention and feeling: Ula Wiznerowicz’s Behind the Curtain. Below is the juror’s statement I wrote for Michael and Taj for their use in announcing the 2012 Daylight Photo Awards winner and jurors’ picks:
                 
                     From 'Behind the Curtain' Photograph by Ula Wiznerowicz 

“Ula Wiznerowicz’s photographs in Behind the Curtain come together in the way a collection of short stories might, stories woven together to tell a larger story both elusive and straight-up sad and difficult. Ula went back to the place she grew up, Palmowo, Poland, to photograph place, people, and problems—specifically, men and women struggling with alcoholism, either themselves or collaterally. And she was also looking at, thinking about, her own past. As she says, ‘I know all of the people in my pictures, their wives, children, the interiors of their homes, and the views from their windows.’ This understanding is manifest in her pictures. Rather than put a frame around public, more predictably dramatic, portrayals of her subject, she shares with us a private view, an atmosphere, a way of being that she both reveals and creates. The formalism of the photographs plays both against and with the tumult, resignation, and loneliness of these very particular lives lived out in a quiet, slowly disappearing community. I found myself revisiting this world behind curtains over and over. The quotes that accompany the photographs—as spare yet revealing as the images—drew me further into these rooms where people sit, wait, sleep.”