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Matinee: 'Street Photography Awards 2016'
5 November 2016
Saturday matinees long ago let us escape from the ordinary world to the island of the Swiss Family Robinson or the mutinous decks of the Bounty. Why not, we thought, escape the usual fare here with Saturday matinees of our favorite photography films?
So we're pleased to present the 160th in our series of Saturday matinees today: Street Photography Awards 2016.
In just about six minutes, Lensculture magazine takes us through 100 entries in its 2016 Street Photography Awards contest.
That means (hang on while we do a little math in our head) you only get to see each image about three seconds. Which is far too short to read many of them.
Three seconds works for the more dramatic images where just one thing happens in the frame, like a splash (there really is a splash, too, seen from overhead). But it doesn't work when you notice an echo of the main action somewhere else in the frame just as its crossfading to the next image.
We can't be hard on the (overwhelmed) judges. They aren't referees or umpires, after all.
You can't slow down a matinee, though. So you'll have to stop it. Keep your hand on the spacebar and if something interests you, hit it. There are quite a few puzzles in this collection and they all reward further study.
If your interest is piqued by what you see, visit the Winners, Finalists, Jurors' Picks and Top 100 page on the Lensculture site. Use our link, not the one mentioned in the movie, which takes you to the archive.
Don't be surprised if nothing at first looks familiar there, though.
The movie shows the "Top 100," which were not the winners but "single images from an additional 100 photographers whose submissions were rated highly by the jury." The 100 from the movie are a bit lower on the contest page.
How are the "Top 100" not winners, though?
Beach Body Bingo by Donato Dicamillo, to take just one example, is unsurpassed.
We've judged a few photo competitions on our watch and we know it's thankless work. So we can't be hard on the (overwhelmed) judges. They aren't referees or umpires, after all. Everyone is entitled to their own genuine enthusiasms, no? Besides, they didn't ignore these extra 100 winners, but celebrated them after all.
And in the end we couldn't argue with Lensculture's conclusion:
What is amazing about an international call for entries like this one -- we reached photographers all over the world, in 15 different languages -- is how we are able to discover new places, trends, traditions and rituals. The entries, which came from 141 countries, amount to a snapshot of tremendously varied urban life in places all over the planet, right now.
We just kind of wish they didn't fly by at three seconds each.