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THE JACOB RIIS AWARD
Sponsored by EYEMAZING Magazine
Juried by Susan Zadeh, Paul Cava, Per Valentin and Alexander Scholtz
The awarded portfolio will be featured in EYEMAZING
CLOSED March 2nd 2010
SUMMARY
The Jacob Riis Award is named after the Danish-American photographer (1849-1914), and is organized by WPGA following its partnership with Save the Children, and sponsored by Eyemazing Magazine. It will focus in portfolios (minimum of 8 and maximum of 12 images) inviting photographers working in all mediums, styles and schools of thought. Traditional, contemporary, avant-garde, creative and experimental works that include old and new processes, mixed techniques, and challenging personal, emotional or political statements will be welcome. The Award is open worldwide to all professional and amateur photographers working with digital or traditional photography or combinations of both. There is no theme for this Award, and the images will be evaluated as a cohesive body of work (a theme or images representing the artistic trajectory of the photographer), rather than individual images. The Award will consist in the publication of the winner portfolio in Eyemazing Magazine (to be published during 2010).
ELIGILIBILITY and THEME
There is one category, and the Award it is open to professional and non professional photographers who will compete together in color and/or black and white, or mixed, portfolios. The themathic is open.
JURORS
WPGA 2009 Annual Contest is pleased to announce that the following jurors will be selecting the portfolios submitted to The Jacob Riis Award:
Susan A. Zadeh, Netherlands (www.eyemazing.com) is the founder, publisher, editor in chief and artistic director of EYEMAZING, an international magazine on contemporary photography based in Amsterdam, and one of the most sensual, oversized and lushly printed art photography publications in the world. A quarterly magazine with 196 pages of cutting edge images by internationally known and unknown talented artists, EYEMAZING won the Lucie Award for the 2008 Photography Magazine of the Year. Also in 2008, Susan was chosen to be a juror for the International Photography Awards, and recently was a juror in the WPGA 2009 Annual Contest. She is also the director of Picture Booklets Publishers B.V Amsterdam. Prior to this Susan was the founding publisher of Freeye Magazine, and was the director of the New Vision Art Photography Foundation in Amsterdam.
Paul Cava, United States (www.paulcava.com) is a photo-based artist known for his sensual and emotionally driven collage work. Concentrating on the human figure and body, Cava’s work speaks to the most intrinsic of human concerns, love and loss. Paul Cava has exhibited paintings, drawings and photo-based works from 1976 to the present in galleries and museums in the United States and Europe, and his work has been collected by a broad range of private and public institutions, including The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Princeton University Museum of Art, and The Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. His work has been featured in many publications including Eyemazing Magazine and Das Magazin. Cava was a recipient of Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grants in 1981 and 1999. In 2005, the German publisher Galerie Vevais, published “Walt Whitman / Paul Cava , Children of Adam from Leaves of Grass” – a bold union of Whitman’s erotic poems and Cava’s art work. His work has been collected by a broad range of private and public institutions, including The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Princeton University Museum of Art, and The Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. In addition to his impact as a fine artist, Cava is notable for the two decades (1979-1999) during which he owned and operated the Paul Cava Gallery. The gallery was, for Philadelphia, a unique showcase for cutting edge photography, painting and sculpture. Cava brought to local and national attention a number of important emerging and, at times, controversial photographers, including Robert Mapplethorpe, Ray Metzker Joel-Peter Witkin, Lynn Davis, Jock Sturges, Sally Mann, Lee Friedlander, Irving Penn, John Divola and Richard Misrach. The gallery also showed Sean Scully, Jannis Kounellis, Mel Bochner and Robert Morris. Cava continues to work as a private photography dealer and publisher.
Per Valentin, Denmark (www.pervalentin.com) is a graphic designer and artist. Per’s interest in photography began already as a 12 year-old, when he inherited his grandfather’s camera, developer and other equipment. His interest lay dormant until a couple of years ago, when he acquired his first digital camera. He was recently appointed chairman for the Association of Danish Photography,which was founded 50 years ago. In the 3 years he has been taking photographs, Per has managed to win several awards and entries at international Salons of Photography. Per’s photos are extremely expressive and full of feeling. He currently travels to different photographic events and conferences, and gives lectures on his world of images. He has recently been potraited in the famous American Magazine for collector’s of art - Black & White.
Alexander Sholtz, Germany (www.galerievevais.de) is Director of the book publishing company Galerie Vevais. Alexander is an author, architect, multimedia artist and publisher. The focal point of his work is, in particular, to develop long-lasting creations. As an architect he has received several prizes for fulfilling both formal and societal needs; as an author and producer of books, CDs and DVDs, he, together with artists of various genres, creates works which require the interaction of all senses and as a result promote human awareness. In the process he develops publications with and for prominent domestic and international artists such as William Ropp, Artur Tress, Paul Cava, Carsten Nicolai, John Wood, Thomas Karsten, Hans Ticha, Alvin Booth and many others – publications which have been awarded prizes by iF Design, reddot, German Photo book Prize and the foundation Stiftung Buchkunst.
PRIZES & AWARDS
The winner of Jacob Riis Award will have her/his portfolio published in Eyemazing magazine during 2010, and will receive a cash prize of $ 3,000. Additionaly the images of his/her portfolio, together with the portfolio of the finalists will be published in the book The Jacob Riis Award 2010. The portfolios selected by the jurors will be exhibited in Europe and/or US in July 2010. As in all WPGA contests, artists commissions of exhibition sales will be 40%, and donation to Save the Children will be 40%. The remaining 20% will be applied to organizational costs. All selected images will be also posted in the Gallery WonderPick for online sales in large editions (option of the photographer).
AWARDS' DATES
Final Deadline: February 28th, 2010 (midnight PST).
Juror's Announcement: Mid April, 2010 (exact date to be determined one week after the deadline; Juror's announcement will be emailed to all participants and posted in this website).
Inaugural Exhibition: Date to be determined 30 days after the Juror's announcement, and emailed to all participants.
ENTRY FEES
(each portfolio should be composed of a minimum of 8 images and a maximum of 12)
$ 80 USD for the first portfolio;$ 40 for each additional portfolio
Payment must be made online by credit or debitcard card (Visa, Visa Electron, Master, Maestro, Amex, Discovery) using the secure payment process that follows your registration and before images of the portfolio are uploaded..Participants will receive a receipt following submission of their portfolios. Until the deadline, participants may replace a submitted image without additional cost. There is no limit to the number of portfolios that may be submitted to the contest.
SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS
Please have read the Rules of Entry before submitting your entries. If you have not read the Awards’ Rules, please click HERE. By reading the Rules you accepting them.
Image Preparation. Prepare your images as required before beginning the submission process. Submissions are only accepted via the online process. Submissions as email attachments, on CD, or prints are not allowed in this Award and will not be returned. Digital image files must meet the following specifications: 8 bit JPEG files(CMYK and 16 bits files will not be uploaded), the largest dimension should be1280 pixels (width or height) ,resolution of 72 dpi, JPG compression quality of 7. Layers must be flattened. Images will be viewed by the jurors as RGB images; therefore Adobe RGB 98 or SRGB profiles should be used. Image title may not exceed 40 characters. Please note that image title is the name of the artwork, not the file name. Start the name with Porfolio 1 (Portfolio 2, Porfolio 3, etc, if you're submitting more than one porfolio). i.e "Portfolio 1 name of image". Files may contain a maximum of 25 characters, not counting .jpg. The file name may not include characters such as #, $, &, periods or other similar characters as part of the file. There will be only one period in the file name, just prior to the file extension (i.e. filename.jpg).
Submission. Submission of entries can only be done online through our very simple and intuitive process. Once you click the below displayed SUBMIT button you will be forwarded to the Entry process consisting of: 1. Registration; 2. Payment of entry fees via credit card; 3. Uploading your images.
If you have already submitted one or more portfolios and want to submit additional portfolios at a later date (before the final deadline) just press the SUBMIT button, then log in using the same user name and password created when you initially registered.
SUBMIT: CLICK HERE TO REGISTER AND/OR TO SUBMIT ONLINE
Jacob August Riis (May 3, 1849 - May 26, 1914)
Jacob Riis was a Danish American social reformer, muckraking journalist and photographer. He is known for his dedication to using his photographic and journalistic talents to help the impoverished in New York City, which was the subject of most of his prolific writings and photography. He helped with the implementation of "model tenements" in New York with the help of humanitarian Lawrence Veiller. As one of the most prominent exponents of the newly practicable flash, he is considered a pioneer in photography.
Jacob Riis was the third of the 15 children (one of whom, an orphaned niece, was fostered) of Niels Edward Riis, a schoolteacher and occasional writer for the local Ribe newspaper, and Carolina Riis (née Carolina Bendsine Lundholme), a homemaker. Among the 15, only Jacob, one sister, and the foster-sister would survive into the twentieth century. Riis was influenced by his father, whose school Riis delighted in disrupting, but who persuaded him to read (and improve his English via) Charles Dickens's magazine All the Year Round and the novels of James Fenimore Cooper.
There was at least one preecho of Riis's later concern for the poor. At eleven or twelve, he donated a coin he had received for Christmas to a poor Ribe family living in a squalid house, but on condition that they cleaned it up. The tenants took the money and obliged; when he told his mother, she went to help.
Discouraged by poor job prospects in the region, Riis decided to emigrate to the United States.
Riis went to the United States in 1870, when he was 21, seeking employment as a carpenter. Riis disembarked in New York on 5 June. He was under informed about the state of affairs, on his first day there spending half the his friends had raised for him on a revolver for defense against human or animal predators.
This was an era of social turmoil. The demographics of American urban centers grew significantly more heterogeneous as immigrant groups arrived in waves, creating ethnic enclaves often more populous than even the largest cities in the homelands. Large groups of migrants and immigrants flooded urban areas in the years following the Civil War seeking prosperity in a more industrialized environment. Twenty-four million people moved to urban centers, causing the population to increase eightfold. In the 1880s 334,000 people were crammed into a single square mile of the Lower East Side, making it the most densely populated place on earth. They were packed into filthy, disease ridden tenements, 10 or 15 to a room in ghettos sequestered from the well-to-do.
After a short period of farming and odd jobs at Mt. Vernon, Riis returned to New York, where he read in the New York Sun that the paper was recruiting soldiers for the war. Riis rushed there to enlist, but the editor (who he would later realize was Charles Dana) claimed or affected ignorance but offered the famished Riis a dollar for breakfast; Riis indignantly declined. Riis was destitute, at one point sleeping on a tombstone and surviving on windfall apples. Still, he found work at a brick-yard at Little Washington and was there for six weeks, until he heard that a group of volunteers was going to the war; he thereupon left for New York.
On arrival, Riis found that the rumor was true but that he had arrived too late. He pled with the French consul, who threw him out. He made various other attempts to enlist, none successful. As Autumn came, Riis was destitute, with no job or, in view of his appearance, hope for any. He survived on scavenged food and handouts from Delmonico's and slept rough or in a foul-smelling police lodging-house. At one point Riis's only companion was a stray dog, who brought him inspiration. In disgust, he left New York, working in the west of the state within Scandinavian communities as a carpenter, but also taking a variety of other jobs. He achieved sufficient financial stability to find the time to experiment as a writer, in both Danish and English, although magazines rejected his manuscripts.
Riis noticed an advertisement by a Long Island newspaper for an editor, applied, and was appointed city editor. He quickly realized why the post had been available: the editor in chief was dishonest and indebted. Riis left in two weeks.
Again unemployed and broke, Riis returned to Five Points. He was sitting outside the Cooper Institute one day when the principal of the school where he had earlier learned telegraphy happened to notice him and said that if he had nothing better to do then the New York News Association was looking for a trainee. After one more night on the streets and a hurried wash in a horse trough, Riis went for an interview, where despite his disheveled appearance he was sent on a test assignment: to cover a luncheon at the Astor House. Riis wrote this up competently and got the job.
Riis was able to write about both the rich and also life in impoverished immigrant communities. He did his job well and was able to move to editor of a weekly, the News. However, this newspaper, a front for a political group, soon went bankrupt. With of his savings and promissory notes, he bought the News.
Riis worked hard at his newspaper, soon paying off his debts. Newly independent, he was able to target the politicians who had previously been his employers. Conveniently, the politicians offered to buy back the newspaper for five times the price Riis had paid; he was thus able to arrive in Denmark a rich man.
After some months in Denmark, he got married and the couple arrived in New York. Riis worked briefly as editor of a south Brooklyn newspaper, the Brooklyn News. To supplement his income, he used a magic lantern to advertise in Brooklyn, either onto a sheet hung between two trees or onto a screen behind a window. The novelty made a success, and Riis and a friend moved on to upstate New York and Pennsylvania as itinerant advertisers. However, this was cut short when the pair were caught up in an armed dispute between striking railroad workers and the police; Riis quickly returned to New York City.
During these stints as a police reporter, Riis worked the most crime-ridden and impoverished slums of the city. Through his own experiences in the poor houses, and witnessing the conditions of the poor in the city slums, he decided to make a difference for those who had no voice. Working the night-shift duty in the immigrant communities of Manhattan's Lower East Side, Riis developed a tersely melodramatic writing style; his pieces gave him credibility in the nascent field of urban reform.
Riis had for some time been wondering how to show the squalor of which he wrote more vividly than his words could express. He tried sketching, but was incompetent at this. Lenses of the 1880s were slow — necessarily, for depth of field despite their considerable focal length — as was the emulsion of photographic plates; photography thus did not appeared to be of any use for a reporter of goings on in dark interiors. In early 1887, however, Riis was startled to read that "A way had been discovered to take pictures by flashlight.” The darkest corner might be photographed that way. The German innovation, by Adolf Miethe and Johannes Gaedicke, was to mix magnesium with potassium chlorate and antimony sulfide for more stability; the powder was used in a pistol-like device that fired cartridges.
Riis informed a friend, Dr John Nagle, a keen amateur photographer and chief of the Bureau of Vital Statistics in the City Health Department. Nagle found two more photographer friends, Henry Piffard and Richard Hoe Lawrence, and the four of them set out to photograph the slums. The first report of this appeared in the New York Sun on February 12, 1888; an unsigned article by Riis, it described its author as "an energetic gentleman, who combines in his person, though not in practice, the two dignities of deacon in a Long Island church and a police reporter in New York". The "pictures of Gotham's crime and misery by night and day" are described as "a foundation for a lecture called 'The Other Half: How It Lives and Dies in New York.' to give at church and Sunday school exhibitions, and the like." The article was illustrated by twelve line drawings based on the photographs.
Riis and his photographers were among the first Americans to use flash. Pistol lamps were dangerous and looked threatening, and it would soon be replaced by another, in which Riis lit magnesium powder on a frying pan. The process involved removing the lens cap, igniting the flash powder, and replacing the lens cap; the time taken to ignite the flash powder sometimes allowed a visible image blurring with that created by the flash.
In January 1888 Riis invested in a 4×5 box camera, plate holders, a tripod, and equipment for developing and printing. He took the equipment to potter's field on Hart Island to practice, making two exposures. The result was seriously overexposed but successful.
For some three years Riis combined his own photographs with others commissioned of professionals, donations by amateurs, and purchased lantern slides, all of which formed the basis for his photographic archive.
Because so much of the work was done at night, allowing documentation of New York City slums to penetrate the dark streets, tenement apartments, and "stale-beer" dives, and helping him capture the hardships faced by the poor and criminal along his police beats, especially on the notorious Mulberry Street.
Riis accumulated a supply of photographs and attempted to submit illustrated essays to magazines. But when an editor at Harper's New Monthly Magazine said that he liked the photographs but not the writing, and would find another writer, Riis was despondent about magazine publication and instead thought of speaking directly to the public.
This was not so easy. The obvious venue would be a church, but several churches, including Riis's own, demurred, fearing either that the talks would offend the churchgoers' sensibilities or that they would run afoul of the rich and powerful landlord circles. However, Adolph Schauffler (of the City Mission Society) and Josiah Strong arranged to sponsor Riis's lecture at the Broadway Tabernacle. Lacking money, Riis found a partner in W. L. Craig, a Health Department clerk.
Riis and Craig's lectures, illustrated with lantern slides, made little money for the pair, but they both greatly increased the number of people exposed to what Riis had to say and also let him meet people who had the power to effect change, notably Charles Parkhurst and an editor of Scribner's Magazine, who invited him to submit an illustrated article.
An eighteen-page article by Riis, "How the Other Half Lives", appeared in the Christmas 1889 edition of Scribner's Magazine. It included nineteen of his photographs, rendered as line drawings. Its publication brought an invitation to expand the material into an entire book.
Riis had already been thinking of writing a book, and went straight to work on it, during nights. (Days were for reporting for the New York Sun, evenings for public speaking.) How the Other Half Lives, subtitled "Studies among the Tenements of New York", was published in 1890, a powerfully written book that reused the eighteen line drawings that had appeared in the Scribner's article but also seventeen reproductions in halftone, and thus representing the first extensive use of halftone photographic reproductions in a book.
Theodore Roosevelt introduced himself to Riis, offering to help his efforts in some way. Upon his appointment to the presidency of the Board of Commissioners of the New York City Police Department in 1895, Roosevelt asked Riis to show him night-time police work. On their first night-time tour, the pair found that nine out of ten patrolmen were missing. Riis wrote this up for the next day's paper, and for the rest of Roosevelt's term the force was more attentive.
Roosevelt closed the police-run lodging rooms in which Riis had suffered during his first years in New York. After reading the exposes, Roosevelt was so deeply moved by Riis's sense of justice that Roosevelt met and befriended Riis for life, later calling Riis "the best American I ever knew."
Riis tried hard to have the slums around Five Points demolished and replaced with a park. His writings led to the Drexel Committee investigation of unsafe tenements; this led to the Small Park Act of 1887. Riis was not invited to the eventual opening of the park, on 15 June 1897, but turned up all the same, together with Lincoln Steffens. In the last speech, the street cleaning commissioner credited Riis for the park and led the public in giving him three cheers of "Hooray, Jacob Riis!" Other parks too were created, and Riis was popularly credited with them as well.
In 1905, Jacob Riis's wife grew ill and died. In 1907, Riis remarried, and with his new wife, Mary Phillips, moved to a farm in Barre, Massachusetts. Riis died on May 26, 1914, at the farm. His second wife would live until 1967, continuing work on the farm, working on Wall Street and teaching classes at Columbia University.
Ansel Adams’ preface to the book Jacob A. Riis, Photographer & Citizen
"To my list of intense experiences in photography, including a preview of some Strand negatives in Taos, the Portraits and Shells of Weston, the Equivalents of Stieglitz and the magnificent human affirmation of Dorothea Lange, I must add the Riis-Alland prints displayed at the Museum of the City of New York.
"For me these are magnificent achievements in the field of humanistic photography ... I know of no contemporary work of this general character which gives such an impression of competence, integrity and intensity.
"I find it difficult to explain my convictions. I am not thinking of Riis's achievement in terms of comparative equipment and materials (that is a line worn thin by now). Obviously, Alland's beautiful prints, by exalting the physical qualities of Riis's work, intensify their expressive content. The factual and dated content of subject has definite historic importance, but the larger content lies in Riis's expression of people in misery, want and squalor. These people live again for you in the print - as intensely as when their images were captured on the old dry plates of ninety years ago. Their comrades in poverty and suppression live here today, in this city - in all the cities of the world. I have thought much about this intense, living quality in Riis's work; I think I have an explanation of its compelling power. It is because in viewing those prints I find myself identified with the people photographed. I am walking in their alleys, standing in their rooms and sheds and workshops, looking in and out of their windows. And they in turn seem to be aware of me.
"In so much photography of people in our time I feel that the photographer is cloaked in invisibility; he captures a fragment of the world without identifying himself with his immediate environment. Perhaps he thinks he achieves identification - but only the spectator of his photograph can be sure. He seems to avoid detection; no one in his pictures seems to recognize him or acknowledge his presence. It is a peephole - or keyhole - view point: the sly capturing of the private moment, the time-slice of turmoil, the "observation" of the little man who wasn't there!
"I remember a photographic educator who violently condemned any picture in which the subject "mugged" the camera. His concept of a picture was suspiciously reminiscent of an aquarium thronged with weary, uninterested fish, or a stage of posturing puppets. 1 fortified myself by recalling Strand's wonderful Mexican photographs; in many of these the subjects are looking at you - you are there with them, you may almost speak to them. Because of this intimacy, reality is magically intensified; another dimension of response is added to the dimensions of statement. Do I hear the word "empathy"?
"Many of the people shown in Riis's work looked at the camera and the photographer at the moment of exposure. They did not realize that they were looking at you and me and all humanity for ages of time. Their postures and groupings are not contrived; the moment of exposure was selected more for the intention of truth than for the intention of effect.
"It would be difficult to imagine these photographs as single images apart from the great matrix of Riis's project. Riis's photographs, books, articles and lectures exist as a unit statement, a consuming lifework. This is what photography should be - an integrated creative and constructive statement, not a series of disconnected and unorganized images of more or less superficial appeal. The photographer when "expressing himself" orreflecting an ideological or purely aesthetic line is, in effect, shadowboxing with reality. The larger aspects of reality humanity, nature in implied or direct relation to humanity - cannot be compressed into stylized, intellectual patterns. Statements which are built upon and express truthful intention will seldom be ineffective. The mechanics of communication partake of truth when truth is the objective. The techniques of the pictorialist and the esoteric abstractionist often reflect the weakness of their concept and expression. In Riis's work I am never conscious of technique, methods or means - only of appropriate and efficient mechanical necessities. As revealed in the Alland prints, the quality of his flash illumination is extraordinary; the plastic shadow-edges, modulations and textures of flesh, the balance of interior flash and exterior daylight - what contemporary work really exceeds it in competence and integrity?"