Telling the whole story
A picture is definetly worth a thousand words and with every picture there is a different set of thousand words. This exhibition cum award show does just that.
“What is great photography?” is a question worth pondering upon. Is it photographs coming out of really expensive cameras or is it when you get the aperture settings right? Or is it about using the depth of field to bring out the foreground, the subject and the background well? These might be the technical aspects of a good photograph, but the soul of it, is the story it has to tell.
It is with this hope to honour good photography that recently an exhibition cum award show was organised at Pragati Maidan titled Eyewin International Photography Awards. It is the first award show for photography to be held across India. Entries from across the globe were selected. Countries like Canada, the US, Malaysia, Japan, Russia, Italy, France, Srilanka, Germany, UAE, and Indonesia were a part of the same. In a chat with Manoj Aryan, the curator and a self-taught photographer, he explains that there is “no hard and fast rule” when talking about a good photograph. Talking about a simple picture of a small room in a slum with a girl lying down on the floor which the jury had shortlisted for the awards, he explains the process of selecting a good photo. “We selected a picture just because it was telling a story. It was not about the technicality, angle, colour,” he explains. For him, a great photograph is one that tells the story and it speaks for itself.
Narrowing down 10,000 entries to 500 is a Herculean task. But that is not where the story ends, folks! “The selected 500 picture were then given to the jury and that was a difficult task for them as well (to narrow down from 500 to a 110),” he says. Through this exhibition cum award show, he wants to provide exposure to photographers. “Photographers in India don’t get to see what’s going on in the world. We wanted to create a platform where Indian photographers should learn from photographers around the world and they should also learn about what is going on in Indian photography”, he concludes.