Hariban Award - International Collotype Competition 2024

Presented by Benrido, the Hariban Award combines a 170-year-old analogue technique with contemporary photography. The award was launched in 2014 with the aim of introducing artists and photographers to collotype, an alternative photographic process.

Overview

Glass plates have been used as collotype printing plates, which is why the award is called “Hariban” because “Hari” means glass plate, and “ban” means printing plate in Japanese. This Award invites professionals and amateurs alike to submit black and white photographs for a chance to win. The winners are carefully selected by a jury of international curators, publishers and artists in the field of photography. The Grand Prize Winner will be invited to a two-week residency in Kyoto, Japan, to collaborate with the master printers of Benrido.

Practical Info

Applicants can submit up to 12 images within one project. All submissions must be monochrome and must include an explanation of the project, year of production, image titles/captions, image location and series name.

After a careful jury selection process, the work with the highest number of votes from all entries is se-lected as the Grand Prize Winner. The selected artist will be awarded a two-week residency on October 2024, including activities of the winner during the stay in Kyoto.

The Grand Prize Winner will collaborate with the Master Printer of the Benrido Collotype Atelier during the stay in Kyoto. Working closely with printers, the winner will produce eight collotype prints of the award-winning works. The arist will learn about the origins of the collotype and how it is made through the Collotype Academy’s collotype hand-printing workshop, and will receive one postcard-size plate and one 8x10 inch plate at the beginning of the workshop.

In addition, an artist talk and social event will be held with Benrido’s staff and craftspeople. Plus, the 2024 Grand Prize Winner’s collotype prints will be exhibited in a solo exhibition held in the spring of the following year after their residency is complete, and will receive a publication of the artwork in the official catalogue of the Hariban Award 2024, to be published in April 2025. Flights, accommodation, and production expenses will be provided by Benrido.

An applicant will be selected from the pool of submissions by each Juror as their nomination for the Juror’s Choice Award. The Juror’s Choice Award winners will receive a dedicated text by their respective nominators that will be printed and published along with a selection of their work in the official Hariban Award Catalogue. All Juror’s Choice Award winners will also receive copies of the limited-edition award catalogue for their personal use.

Selected by Benrido CEO Takumi Suzuki, the Benrido Award winner will receive a dedicated text written by Mr. Suzuki and will have an image printed and published in collotype within the official Hariban Award catalogue. The Benrido Award winner will also receive a copy of the catalogue for their personal use.

Artists selected for the Juror’s Choice Award and Benrido Award will receive an extra prize consisting in a five-day course at the Benrido Collotype Academy. Travel and accommodation expenses are not included in this award.

After the winners of the Grand Prize, Juror’s Choice Award and Benrido Award have been selected, runners-up from the final round of judging will be given Honourable Mentions. An image of their submitted work will be printed and published within the official Hariban Award catalogue. All finalists will receive a catalogue for the award printed in collotype and hand-bound by traditional binders in Kyoto, Japan, which will be published in 2025.

The jury is composed of Tomoka Aya (Gallery Owner and Director The Third Gallery Aya), Markus Schaden (Co-director of the PhotoBookMuseum in Cologne, and Founder of schaden.com, a bookshop and publisher specialising in photography books), Jess Baxter (Assistant Curator, International Art at Tate Modern, Researcher and Writer) and Clint Woodside (Photographer, Curator and Founder of Deadbeat Club).

About Benrido & Collotype

Founded in 1887, Benrido opened its collotype atelier in 1905 and has specialised in the collotype printing tech-nique for over 120 years. Today, collotype studios are rare in the world, but Benrido continues to produce fine colour collotype prints and works to pass the technique on to the next generation.

Collotype is an alternative printing process that was invented in 1855 by the French engineer Alphonse Poitevin as a method of photographic fine art printing. Photographic prints of the 19th century had poor image preservabil-ity and gradually faded and discoloured over time. To compensate for this, various printing methods using pig-ments were devised; one of the established techniques among them was collotype. Not only did it offer a high degree of preservation, but it also made it possible to produce a large number of prints as printmaking once the printing plate is pigmented. Collotype was put into practice by Joseph Albert in Germany and then widely used throughout the world, later being introduced to Japan from the USA.