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Ready Flesh
"The disturbing and monumental self-portrait of Alberto Lara is a definite winner of the competition. Not only does it shine in its aesthetics, but above all, it has a surreal character. Again, this is an image that makes you slightly uncomfortable looking at it. An absolute must in a time when we’re constantly surrounded by images." Erik Kessels
"This self-portrait is a great mobile photo of the year because it proves the emotional power of mobile photography; it is one moment, one idea, one colour, and one expression synthetised in an image that presents the new generations and their identity changes and transitions in a powerful and simple way. Colour, composition, expression, originality, self-questioning, doubt, affirmation, courage… all coexist in this intimate self-portrait, a contemporary reflection on a changing definition of the self." Marcelo Brodsky
"The raw, unnatural color of the flesh, the cryptic stare, the prone, awkward position, the indecipherable setting, everything in Alberto Lara's compelling portrait asks you to keep on looking - or to just surrender to its magnetic charm." Chiara Bardelli Nonino
From the first uses in sculptures and paintings to modern selfies, the evolution of representing ourselves coincided with the evolution of the techniques and technologies used. The portrait and the self-portrait as a means of investigating and reflecting on ourselves.
Alberto Lara
£1,000
Annika Haas
£250
Anastasia Potekhina
£150
Francine Lasevitch
It was the most used hashtag on Instagram in 2018, with an all-time count of 1.5 billion posts. The concept will be analysed in its broadest meanings, trying to answer a simple yet non-banal question: what is love in the age of social media?
Valentin Suciu
£1,000
Debarshi Sarkar
£250
So aSa
£150
Patricia Cançado
The idea of travelling, images of landscape, people and animals. Photos that represent vacations and visits to faraway places, but also the concept of travelling from a metaphorical point of view. The mobile phone has become the main tool for telling and representing our innate desire for exploration and escape.
Sofia Verzbolovskis
£1,000
Francisco Mata
£250
Zay Yar Lin
£150
Ján Šipöcz
Viktoria Spasova
Renée Hilhorst
The constant presence of the mobile phone in our daily lives, its simplicity of use, and its discretion have made the phone one of the most widespread tools to tell not only personal moments but also collective stories and daily news.
Yifei Cheng
£1,000
Maheen Qadri
£250
Joan Sorolla
£150
Ruben Salgado Escudero
Kulanandini Mahanta
Efrat Sela
Social media and fashion have influenced each other's growths. Nowadays fashion houses guide users' habits and customs, but it is also ordinary people with their "social" shots that affect the the way brands communicate. Where do we stand after more than 10 years of digital interaction?
Malick Kebe
£1,000
Ed Kashi
£250
Christopher Iduma
£150
Obiageli Adaeze Okaro
Jade Carr-Daley
Awarded by The Smart View
Rosa Roth, Founder & Editor of The Smart View selected 5 images from all the submissions to be published in TSV_ZINE Edition Issue n°4, a new printed photo zine which will be released in September 2019.
Farshad Usyan
Victor Tan KH
Malick Kebe
Azadeh Besharati
Awarded by GUP Magazine Editorial Team
GUP Magazine Editorial Team have chosen 3 photographers from all the submissions to receive an online portfolio feature plus a yearly subscription to their printed magazine.
Alejo Reinoso
Heidi Piiroinen
PHmuseum's Team will select around 200 images that will be published in a limited edition book. The publication will be the first one of a series of volumes that will be released on an annual basis with the aim of immortalize on paper the ephemeral images describing the phenomenon of the last few years.
Winners announced! See all the results and order your copy.
PHmuseum and Spazio Labo’ teams will curate a solo show with a selection of images handpicked among all the submissions. The exhibition will be held at Spazio Labo’ gallery in Bologna, Italy in January 2020 during ArteFiera, one of the most important art fairs in Europe.
1st Prize
What can stimulate more conversations, controversies and reflections than an image pretending to summarize the issues, trends and energy of a year? To your mobile devices and to the judges' opinion the difficult sentence.
"PHmuseum's Team will select around 200 images that will be published in a limited edition book. The publication will be the first one of a series of volumes that will be released on an annual basis with the aim of immortalize on paper the ephemeral images describing the phenomenon of the last few years."
Poulomi Basu, judge of the PHM 2018
Mobile photography or the possibility of communicating with each other with images - of sending images instead of words to each other - marks a fundamental change in contemporary language. Language will never be the same after the violent irruption of photography as a central component in every day human communications. Marcelo Brodsky, Judge
Picture Editor, The Guardian Weekend magazine
Caroline Hunter is picture editor for The Guardian Weekend magazine, the award-winning Saturday supplement to the Guardian newspaper. She regularly commissions photography from around the world, from conceptual images to celebrity, portraits, still-life and documentary photography. Caroline has 20 years experience of commissioning photography and reviewing photo-essays, proposals and projects for publication. She has previously worked for a number of different publications including The Telegraph Magazine and Time Out London.
Caroline gives talks and workshops on photography and is regularly invited to review portfolios at leading photo-festivals. Caroline has acted as a judge for a number of international photography competitions including Portrait of Britain, LensCulture Street Photography awards, PDN Photo Annual and PhotoLucida/Critical Mass awards. In 2017, she was invited to be a nominator for the Deutsche Borse photography prize, and was a TV judge for the second series of the popular televised photography competition, Sky Arts’ Master of Photography.
Visual Artist
Marcelo Brodsky (B. 1954, Buenos Aires) is an international visual artist with work focused on visual language, memory, and human rights. His work combines text and images to convey meaning and to build up alternative narratives. In 1996-1997 he edited and exhibited the photographic essay Buena Memoria (Good Memory) based on the effects of state terrorism in Argentina. The iconic Class picture is now shown permanently in the schools main hall as part of its history. Marcelo is the founder of the Parque de la Memoria and a member of its Board. The park is a large monument and art exhibition space to honor and remember the victims of Argentina’s military dictatorship. He is also the founder of Visual Action, an NGO dedicated to transferring visual expertise to NGOs.
Major works and photobooks include Buena Memoria, Nexo, Memory under construction, Once@9:53, Visual Correspondences, Tree time, and 1968 The Fire of Ideas, which was shown extensively in Europe and Latin America at the Lyon Biennale (France), the UNAM University Museum of Tlatelolco (Mexico), the Itau Foundation Photography Forum (Brazil), and Rencontres d’Arles (France) among many others. His latest work on 1968 is an Opera in collaboration with a musician and a drama director, commissioned by Teatro Colon of Buenos Aires that premiered in December 2018.
His work is in the collections of the Tate Modern (London) The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the Pinacoteca del Estado (Sao Paulo), the National Museum of Fine Arts (Argentina) among others. Awards include the 2008 B’nai Brith award for Human Rights and the Dr. Jean Mayer award for his human rights and artistic work by Tufts University, Boston, USA.
Photo Editor, Vogue Italia & L'Uomo Vogue
Chiara Bardelli Nonino is the Photo Editor of Vogue Italia and L’Uomo Vogue, the editor of Vogue.it Photography section and a curator for the Photo Vogue Festival, where fashion is explored from a socio-political point of view in exhibit such as The Female Gaze, Fashion & Politics in Vogue Italia, All That Man Is - Fashion and Masculinity Now, Italian Panorama. With a focus on contemporary photography, she works also on independent editorial and curatorial projects and juries. She has collaborated with Flash Art Italia, The British Journal of Photography, The Photocaptionist, Metronom Gallery and Red Hook Labs.
Artist and Curator
Born in 1966, lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Erik Kessels is a Dutch artist, designer and curator with great interest in photography. since 1996 Erik Kessels is the Creative Partner of the communications agency KesselsKramer in Amsterdam and works for national and international clients such as Nike, Diesel, J&B Whisky, Oxfam, Ben, Vitra, Citizen M, and The Hans Brinker Budget Hotel.
As an artist and photography curator Kessels has published over 60 books of his 're-appropriated' images: Missing Links (1999), The Instant Men (2000), In almost every picture (2001-2015) and Wonder (2006). Since 2000, he has been an editor of the alternative photography magazine Useful Photography and has written the international bestseller “Failed It!”. For the DVD art project Loud & Clear he worked together with artists such as Marlene Dumas and Candice Breitz. Kessels writes regular editorials for numerous international magazines. He lectured at the D&AD Presidents Lecture and at several international design conferences in Singapore, Goa, New York, Toronto, and Bangkok. He has taught at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy (Amsterdam), Écal (Lausanne) and at the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture where he curated a celebration of amateurism.
Kessels made and curated exhibitions such as Loving Your Pictures, Mother Nature, 24HRS in Photos, Album Beauty, Unfinished Father and GroupShow. He also co-curated an exhibition called From Here On together with Martin Parr, Joachim Schmid, Clement Cheroux and Joan Fontuberta. In 2010 Kessels was awarded with the Amsterdam Prize of the Arts, and in 2016 nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. In 2017 his mid-career retrospective was shown in Turin and Düsseldorf and exhibited this year in the MOMA. He was called “a visual sorcerer” by Time Magazine and a “Modern Anthropologist” by Vogue (Italia).
Photographers Sarker Protick and Piero Percoco, and Photo Editors Francesca Marani (Vogue Italia) and Kate Bubacz (BuzzFeed) give us some useful insights on their expectations for the open call.
With this year's deadline recently extended to 25 June, get to know the story behind another 4 images which were selected last year for Familiar Stranger, PHmuseum's first photobook on mobile photography.
17 June 2020
Learn more about the experiences of the photographers who got involved in the activities we organised through last year's open call.
Last year's applicants Noémi Szécsi, Santiago Serrano, Katerina Stratos, and Ge Zeng tell us the story behind their images that were featured in Familiar Stranger, PHmuseum's first book on mobile photography.
27 May 2020
Mobile photography continues to grow and develop at a phenomenal rate and has changed the way we take, make and display photographs in the modern age. It's an exciting moment in the history of photography. For this competition, I'll be looking for creativity, originality and emotion. I enjoy viewing images that allow me to connect on an emotional level as well as those that are simply beautifully and artfully created. Caroline Hunter, Judge