Latvian photographer Andrejs Strokins and Hungarian photographer Gábor Arion Kudász are among the winners of this year’s Conscientious Portfolio Competition, a contest aimed at emerging photographers organised by fine-art photography website Conscientious Photography Magazine.
Judge Emma Bowkett, Director of Photography of the Financial Times Weekend Magazine and PORT magazine, selected Strokins’s series Cosmic Sadness.
“These peculiar pictures of the everyday with their strange colour palette have invited my curiosity. A wonderful, uneasy world, meticulously staged for the viewer to enter,” she said of the work.
Strokins numbered among the shortlisted photographers of Calvert 22’s New East Photo Prize for his project People in the Dunes.
Art historian and theorist Felix Hoffmann, who currently serves as Head Curator of the C/O Berlin Foundation, chose Gábor Arion Kudász’s project Human.
“The series contains different aspects of thinking. There is a documentary approach to a site where people are working with clay. There is a surrealistic approach, a reflection of the material and physicality of the objects. And there is a scientific interaction in these pictures where the viewer doesn’t know any longer why they might have been taken,” Hoffmann explained.
The third winner is German photographer Katrin Koenning, whose project Indefinitely was chosen by the founder and editor of Conscientious Photography Magazine, Jörg M. Colberg.