Now in its 6th year, All About Photo Awards are an authoritative voice in the industry, celebrating the best contemporary photography from around the world, and giving vast exposure and opportunity to talented photographers. All About Photo supports the Awards to help the continued development of photographic culture by giving a global platform to today's talent. Photographers are judged anonymously by a panel of industry-leading judges.
This year's internationally diverse jury brings a range of knowledge and expertise from varied photographic backgrounds and includes:
Keith Cullen: Founder Setanta Books
Denis Dailleux: Photographer, Agency VU'
Stefano De Luigi: Photographer, VII Agency
Monica Denevan: Photographer, Winner All About Photo Awards 2020
Claudine Doury: Photographer, Agency VU'
Ann Jastrab: Executive Director, Center for Photographic Art, Carmel, CA.
Sandrine Hermand-Grisel: Photographer, Founder & Editor of All About Photo
Stephan Vanfleteren: Photographer, Writer & Art-director of Hannibal Books
Hiroshi Watanabe: Photographer
Alison Wright: Photographer & Author
2021 PRIZES AND DEADLINES
All About Photo Awards is open to submissions from December 5th, 2020 until January 31st, 2021.
Winners will receive $10,000 in cash awards, extensive press coverage and global recognition.
The grand prize is $5,000, the 2nd prize is $2,000, the 3rd prize is $1,500, the 4th prize is $1,000 and the 5th prize is $500!
All winners will have their work published/showcased on Daylighted's digital traveling exhibition worldwide, All About Photo Winners Gallery and featured in the printed issue of AAP Magazine Special Edition All About Photo Awards 2021. In addition, a selection of entrants of particular merit will be invited to display their portfolio on the website www.all-about-photo.com Full competition and categories descriptions
2021 JURORS
Denis Dailleux
Denis Dailleux lives in Paris when he is not in India, Egypt or Ghana. Reprensed by Agency VU', Camera Obscura Gallery (Paris), Galerie 127 (Marrakech), Galerie Peter Sellem (Francfort) and the Box Galerie (Brussels), his work has been exhibited and distinguished worldwide.
He is the acclaimed author of several books about Egypt: Habibi Cairo, Le Caire mon amour (Filigranes, 1997), Le Caire (Le Chêne, 2001), Impressions d'Egypte (La Martinière, 2011), Egypte, Les Martyrs de la révolution (Le Bec en lair, 2014), Mères et fils (Le Bec en l'air, 2014), Ghana (Le Bec en l'air, 2016) and Persan-Beaumont (Le Bec en l'air, 2018).
Imbued with his distinctive delicacy, Denis Dailleux's photographic work appears calm on the surface, yet is incredibly demanding, run through by an undercurrent of constant self-doubt and propelled by the essential personal bond he develops with those (and that which) he frames with his camera. His passion for people has naturally led him to develop portraiture as his preferred means of representing those whose true self he feels an urge to get closer to. Which he has, with actress Catherine Deneuve as well as with countless anonymous subjects from the slums of Cairo, working with the same discretion, waiting to get from his subjects what he is hoping they will offer him, without ever asking for it, simply hoping that it will happen. That is how he has patiently constructed a unique portrait of his beloved Cairo to create, with black and whites of exemplary classicism and colors of rare subtlety, the definite alternative to the heaps of cultural and touristic clichés which clutter our minds. - Christian Caujolle
These past years, while continuing to photograph Egypt, Denis Dailleux has traveled regularly to Ghana where he explores new relations with regard to body and space, life and death, community, the sea, which opens up new horizons to his photographic research.
Regularly exhibited and published in national and international press, Denis Dailleux is also the winner of prestigious prizes, including the World Press Photo - Category Staged Portraits for his series Mother and Son in 2014, and in 2019 the Roger Pic Prize awarded by Scam for his series In Ghana - We shall meet again . Denis Dailleux's Website
Alison Wright
Alison Wright, an award-winning documentary photographer and author, has travelled to 150 countries photographing indigenous cultures and people while covering issues concerning the human condition. She is a recipient of the Dorothea Lange Award in Documentary Photography, a two-time winner of the Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Award, and an Explorers Club Fellow. She was recently named a National Geographic Traveler of the Year as someone who travels with a sense of passion and purpose.
Alison has published ten books. Her upcoming book, Grit and Grace: Women at Work documents the empowerment of women working in global communities (Schiffer 2021). Her work has been published in numerous magazines including National Geographic, National Geographic Traveler, National Geographic Adventure, Outside, Islands and Smithsonian.
Alison's life was nearly cut short during a devastating bus accident on a remote jungle road in Laos. Her best-selling memoir, Learning to Breathe; One Woman's Journey of Spirit and Survival, chronicles her inspirational story of survival, the years of rehabilitation and her ongoing determination to recover and continue traveling the world as an intrepid visual storyteller. This experience while working in post disaster/conflict areas inspired her to establish a foundation called Faces of Hope (facesofhope.org); a non-profit that globally supports women and children's rights by creating visual awareness and donating directly to grass-roots organizations that help sustain them through education and healthcare. Alison Wright's Website Faces of Hope
Stefano De Luigi
Stefano De Luigi (1964) is a professional photographer since 1988. He lived in Paris from 1989 to 1996, working as photographer for the Louvre Museum In 2000 he received the Honorable Mention of Leica Oskar Barnack Award.
That same year he started a personal project titled Pornoland, a photographic journey on pornographic film sets, around the world. In 2004 Pornoland became a book with a text by Martin Amis, published in 5 countries by Thames and Hudson, Knessebeck La Martinière and Contrasto. Pornoland has been exhibited at REA gallery (Paris 2004), Santa Cecilia gallery (Rome 2005), Lanificio (Naples 2006), Festival Transphotographiques (Lille 2007), New York Photo Festival (NY 2011).
Personal exhibitions of others De Luigi's projects in these years, include: WHO Head Quarter (Geneva 2010), VII Gallery (New York 2010), 10b Gallery (Rome 2010), Museu,m of Modern Art (Rovereto 2011), Photofestival (Athens 2012/15), Fondazione Stelline (Milan, 2013) Paris Mois de la Photo (2014) FotoIstanbul 2015) Venice Candiani Cultural Center(2017) Plenum Gallery Catania (2018) Museum of Palazzo Ducale (Genes 2019).
From 2003 to 2010, he worked on Blanco a photographic project on life condition of blind people, around the world. Blanco received the patronage of World Health Organisation and won the W.E. Smith Fellowship Grant in 2007.
In 2006 Stefano De Luigi embarked on the project Cinema Mundi, a World Cinema exploration on the alternative cinematographic scene far away from Hollywood dream factory, including countries as China, Russia, Iran, Argentina, Nigeria, South Korea and India. Cinema Mundi has been also transformed in a short 7 minutes movie projected at Locarno International Film Festival on August 4, 2007.
Stefano De Luigi has won the World Press Photo contest four times in different categories (1998-2007-2010-2011).
In 2009 he won the Moving Walls of Soros Foundation and his work has been on show in Washington and New York. In 2010 he won the Days Japan International Photojournalism Award and the Getty Grant for Editorial Photography.
Always in 2010, Blanco became a book:, Blanco (Trolleybooks). Blanco won the POYi Best Photography Book Award in 2011. In 2013, Stefano De Luigi has won the Days Japan (Special Jury Prize) and Prix du Festival de St-Brieuc. In 2015 he was awarded with the Syngenta prize in London. In 2017 he published his third book iDyssey with French publisher Edition Bessard and in 2018 his last book Babel was published by Postracrt in Italy.
His photographs have been published in the most important international magazines, including: Stern, Paris Match, Le Monde 2, Time, The New Yorker, , Geo ,Vanity Fair, El Pais, Sunday Time Magazine.
Stefano De Luigi is a member of VII agency since 2008 and lives in Paris. Stefano De Luigi's Website
Stephan Vanfleteren
Stephan Vanfleteren is one of Belgium's most renowned photographers. Among the general public, he is mainly celebrated for his penetrating black and white portraits of people from all walks of life, from artists and actors, to surfers, fisher- and sportsmen. However, his oeuvre is much more diverse than that. Starting his career as a press photographer, Vanfleteren made captivating photo reports about the events that dominated the news of the 1990s, such as the genocide in Rwanda, the war in Kosovo, ect. Later on, he began to elaborate a variation of themes in extended photo reportages, going from storefront façades to a journey along the mythical Atlantic Wall. For his most recent work, Vanfleteren withdrew into his studio to focus on his own version of classic themes such as nude portraits and still life photography. Whether it concerns his journalistic, documentary or artistic photographic projects; Vanfleteren always remains true to his characteristic style and esthetic. A palet of black and whites, the use of sharp contrasts and well-defined details is the trademark that he developed throughout the years. Vanfleteren prefers to portray his subjects against a plain background to be able to focus on the people and characters standing in front of his lens, including all wrinkles life gave them. The resulting purified and raw images stand out for their simplicity, intensity and drama. Driven by creative gloom, Vanfleteren often focuses on what is on the verge of disappearing. From the turn of the century onwards, he starts documenting his home country Belgium and its inhabitants and this resulted in 2007 in the series 'Belgicum'. In 2019 Vanfleteren had his retrospective exhibition & photobook PRESENT. More than 146,000 visitors came to the exhibition at Fomu Antwerp. He's cofounder and art-director of the Belgian publishing house Hannibal Books, specialized in photography & art. Stephan Vanfleteren is represented by Gallery Fifty One, Antwerp. Stephan Vanfleteren's Website Hannibal Books
Claudine Doury
After studying journalism, she worked as a photo editor for Agence Gamma in Paris, for Contact Press agency in New York, and then for the french newspaper Libération. She became a photographer in 1989 and joined Agence VU' shortly afterwards.
Her work addresses the notions of memory, transition and passage, especially around adolescence and travel, which are central themes of her work.
In 1999, she received the Leica Oscar Barnack Prize and a World Press Award for her work on the Peoples of Siberia, which led to the publication of her first monograph by Le Seuil.
In 2004, her second book Artek, un été en Crimée was published by Editions de la Martinière, and received the Niépce Prize for her body of work.
She then published Loulan Beauty (2007), Sasha - a work on the end of childhood - (2011) and L'homme nouveau - a series that questions male identity - (2017).
In 2017, she was awarded a national commission on French youth from the Ministry of Culture and Communication, and the same year received the Marc Ladreit de Lacharrière Prize - Académie des Beaux-Arts, to carry out in 2018 her project Une odyssée sibérienne
Her work is regularly exhibited in France and abroad, notably at Parc de La Villette (Paris), the Rencontres d'Arles, Paris Photo, the Pavillon Carré de Baudouin (Paris), and the Villa Perochon (Niort). Her photographs appear in prestigious private and public collections among which the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, lthe Fonds National d'Art Contemporain , artothèques of la Rochelle and of la Roche-sur-Yon, the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne(Switzerland), the Fonds d'Art Contemporain in Meyrin (Switzerland), the Museu da Imagem in Braga (Portugal), Leica Camera, Agnès B's collections, etc. Claudine Doury's Website
Hiroshi Watanabe
Born in Sapporo, Hokkaido, Japan, I graduated from the Department of Photography of Nihon University in 1975. I moved to Los Angeles, where I worked as a production coordinator for Japanese television commercials and later co-founded a Japanese coordination services company. I obtained an MBA from the UCLA Anderson Business School in 1993. Two years later, however, my earlier interest in photography revived, and I started to travel worldwide, extensively photographing what I found intriguing at each moment and place. As of 2000, I have worked full-time at photography.
After I produced five self-published books, my first collection to be published conventionally was I See Angels Every Day, monochrome portraits of patients and scenes from San Lázaro psychiatric hospital in Quito, Ecuador. This work won Japan's 2007 Photo City Sagamihara Award for professional photographers.
In 2006, I won a Critical Mass Award from Photolucida, Portland, OR, resulting in publication of my monograph Findings in 2007.
In 2006 and 2007, I traveled to North Korea, and my book documenting the experience, titled Ideology of Paradise, was published in Japan. With that work I won First Prize in the Santa Fe Center Project Competition in 2008.
In 2009 I received a commission from the San Jose (California) Museum of Art to document from an artist's perspective subjects of my choice relating to the city's Japantown. I decided to photograph artifacts from the Japanese internment camps established during the Second World War. All images from this project were purchased by the museum and exhibited in 2011.
In 2010 I was chosen as one of fourteen artists invited to photograph Venice, Italy, for a project called Real Venice, a major art initiative to raise funds for Venice. The artists were commissioned to visit the city and create a portfolio of images with total artistic freedom. The result, the Real Venice exhibition, was shown during the 54th Venice Biennale at San Giorgio Maggiore Abbey and later at the Somerset House in London (May 31 to September 30 and October 10 to December 11, 2011, respectively).
In 2013 I was invited to participate in Bull City Summer in Durham, North Carolina, a project inspired by the 25th anniversary of the movie Bull Durham. Ten nationally and internationally acclaimed photographers documented the 2013 season at the Durham Bulls Athletic Park, home of the legendary minor league baseball team. The exhibit was shown at the North Carolina Museum of Art (February 23 to August 31, 2014).
From April 4 to July 21, 2014, my photographs of artifacts from the Tule Lake Japanese internment camps were the centerpiece exhibit in The Art of Survival: Enduring the Turmoil of Tule Lake, at the Favell Museum in Klamath Falls, Oregon. The exhibition is currently on tour in the US.
In 2016 I received a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation.
My work is in the permanent collections of the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, George Eastman House, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, J. Paul Getty Museum, San Jose Museum of Art, New Mexico Museum of Art, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Hiroshi Watanabe's Website
Monica Denevan
Monica Denevan is an American photographer, born in San Francisco, who works with a medium-format camera and prints from negatives in her traditional darkroom. She earned a BA in photography at San Francisco State University where she discovered her love of portraiture and printing.
Denevan travels as often as she can. Her ongoing series “Songs of the River: Portraits from Burma” began in 2000 at the end of a five-month trip to South East Asia and continued through early 2020. In 2016, ten of her images were included in a book of Lao photographs published by Nazraeli Press, and Friends Without A Border in NYC.
Denevan's photographs have been exhibited widely including solo shows at Scott Nichols Gallery (Sonoma, CA), Duncan Miller Gallery (Santa Monica, CA), Tao Gallery (Hong Kong), and Serindia Gallery Annex (Bangkok.) In addition, her photographs have been included in group exhibitions at Photo-Eye Gallery (Santa Fe, NM), Center for Photographic Art (Carmel, CA), Galerie Huit Arles (Arles, France), and Capital Culture Gallery (Norfolk, UK), among others.
In 2019 and 2012, Denevan was a Photolucida Critical Mass Top 50 Finalist. She is honored to be the 2020 All About Photo first place award recipient.
Monica Denevan is represented by Scott Nichols Gallery (Sonoma, CA), Capital Culture Gallery (Norfolk, UK), and Open House Bookshop (Bangkok.) She lives in San Francisco with her cat Moxie and is aunt to Cuba, a shepherd mix. She enjoys boxing, backpacking, and cooking. Monica Denevan's Website
Ann Jastrab
Ann M. Jastrab is the Executive Director at the Center for Photographic Art (CPA) in Carmel, California. CPA strives to advance photography through education, exhibition and publication. These regional traditions-including mastery of craft, the concept of mentorship, and dedication to the photographic arts-evolved out of CPA's predecessor, the renowned Friends of Photography established in 1967 by iconic artists Ansel Adams, Wynn Bullock and Cole Weston. While respecting these West Coast traditions, CPA is also at the vanguard of the future of photographic imagery. Before coming onboard at CPA, Ann was the gallery manager at Scott Nichols Gallery in San Francisco where she incorporated contemporary artists with the living legends photography.
Ann also worked as the gallery director at RayKo Photo Center in San Francisco for 10 years until their closure in 2017. Ann has curated many shows in the Bay Area while simultaneously jurying, curating, and organizing numerous exhibitions for other national and international venues outside of San Francisco. She has reviewed portfolios for a multitude of organizations including the Seoul International Photography Festival in Korea, Fotofest, Photolucida, GuatePhoto, PhotoNola, Review Santa Fe, Medium, Palm Springs Photo Festival, Filter, PhotoAlliance, and Lishui International Photography Festival in China as well as being a juror for Critical Mass. While being a champion of artists, she created a thriving artist-in-residence program at RayKo where recent residents Meghann Riepenhoff, Carlos Javier Ortiz, and McNair Evans all received Guggenheim Fellowships.
Besides being a curator, Ann Jastrab, MFA, is a fine art photographer, master darkroom printer, and teacher as well. She has been leading courses in the San Francisco Bay Area and at the Maine Media Workshops (formerly the Maine Photographic Workshops) in Rockport, Maine since 1995. Center for Photographic Art
Keith Cullen
Keith Cullen is the owner of Setanta books a photography publisher and bookseller. Prior to this Keith ran his own independent record label, Setanta for 15 years.
Setanta Books is a photography and rare fiction online bookseller based in London. We ship worldwide daily. We specialise in collectible rare first edition photography and fiction books. Similarly we also sell limited edition signed prints.
Setanta also publishes contemporary and fine art photography books with a range of artists. For instance, Ian Howorth and Megan Doherty.
Our collection is more than 10,000 books and it keeps growing each month. We love anything photography and fiction related and we do our utmost to give you the very best examples of books and prints. Setanta Books
Sandrine Hermand-Grisel
Sandrine Hermand-Grisel is a professional photographer who specializes in Fine Art Photography and Printmaking. She grew up in Paris, France and in London, UK before she moved to the United States with her family in 2006. She decided to use her knowledge of the photography world to become the curator of the website, All About Photo, which she founded in 2013. Much more than a cultural agenda, All About Photo is a source of information for photographers and aficionados of photography as well as a showcase platform for talented artists.
An integral part of All About Photo is its annual awards competition, The Mind’s Eye, she has juried over the years with renowned photographers and curators such as Liu Bolin, Ann Jastrab, Ed Kashi, Eli Klein, Jules Maeght, Aline Smithson, Ami Vitale, Judy Walgren, Sabine Weiss, Frank Horvat, Elizabeth Avedon and many more. She also juried competitions and shows for A Smith Gallery, Darkroom Gallery, Gomma Photography Grant, Rayko Photo Center, L.A. & N.Y. Photo Curator, Emerge UK Prize, The PhotoPlace Gallery, Praxis Gallery, The Young Photographer's Award and others.
Sandrine Hermand-Grisel's work has been published in books and magazines as well as exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide.
While still working on personal projects, she now spends most of her time discovering new talents for All About Photo. She is also working on the new AAP Magazine committed exclusively to the publication of portfolios. Sandrine Hermand-Grisel's Website
Lost & Found documents a contemporary American subculture of young Travelers through raw, striking portraiture and intimate storytelling. These Travelers abandon home to move around the country by hitchhiking and freight train hopping in a nomadic, transient existence outside of mainstream society. Along their personal journey driven by wanderlust, escapism, or a search for transient jobs, they find a new family in their traveling friends.
The high of freedom, however, does not come without consequence. The black and white portraits are made in public, on the street, using natural light. Individual stories, as a collection, form a greater narrative. Over ten years in the making, Joseph’s portraits reveal the human condition. They capture courage, tenderness, and determination in his subjects that have been largely ignored and unseen.
An incredible book that we highly recommend! All About Photo
I’m So Happy You Are Here presents a much-needed counterpoint, complement, and challenge to historical precedents and the established canon of Japanese photography. This restorative history presents a wide range of photographic approaches brought to bear on the lived experiences and perspectives of women in Japanese society. Editors Pauline Vermare and Lesley A. Martin, curator and writer Takeuchi Mariko, and photo-historians Carrie Cushman and Kelly Midori McCormick provide a critical historical and contemporary framework for understanding the work in three richly illustrated essays. Additional context is provided by an in-depth illustrated bibliography by Marc Feustel and Russet Lederman, and a selection of key critical writings from leading Japanese curators, critics, and historians such as Kasahara Michiko, Fuku Noriko, and others, many of which will be published in translation for the first time. While this book does not claim to be fully comprehensive or encyclopedic, its goal is to provide a solid foundation for a more thorough conversation about the contributions of Japanese women to photography—and an indispensable resource for anyone interested in a more robust history of Japanese photography.
Rotan Switch is the first monograph by Lisa McCord, documenting life on her grandparents’ cotton farm in the Arkansas Delta community of Rotan. It takes its name from the community’s central landmark—the railroad switch where farmers loaded their cotton bales onto trains headed out of the Delta. Although it hasn’t been used in years, it remains a potent symbol of the complex intersections of industry and agriculture, of race and injustice. Collected over the last forty-four years, these images and stories are a reflection on the people and places that have taught McCord the meaning of the word home. It is also a self-exploration into her inherently complicated role in this community as both the photographer and the granddaughter of the farm owner.
This publication is a long-term project, constructed from McCord's analog photographs, family snapshots and ephemera. Including, monochrome photographs, color polaroids, and recipes.
João Pina draws upon his family history to tell the story of the Portuguese concentration camp at Tarrafal, Cape Verde which operated between 1936 and 1974. The visual history of the camp is told through the only known photographs taken inside the Tarrafal camp, combined with correspondence, archives, objects and Pina’s own contemporary photographs. Collectively these materials create a new dialogue about the Portuguese fascist regime of the past—and the resistance to it—on the 50th anniversary of its demise. In 1949, Pina’s grandfather Guilherme da Costa Carvalho—a young communist militant— was sent to the camp. Later that year Guilherme’s parents were granted unprecedented permission to visit their son and using a Rolleiflex camera they photographed all the living prisoners and the graves of the ones who had died in the camp. This extensive visual record—the only one ever made inside the concentration camp—was created with the intent of reporting back to the families of the other prisoners held in the camp or had died there. Seventy years later, in 2019, Pina began investigating a box in his family archive containing the negatives, contact sheets, vintage prints of these pictures made inside the camp, along with related letters and telegrams sent from his grandfather.