An unusual thing happened to me this past weekend.
I drove to New Haven, Connecticut, to photograph the #6 ranked Yale women’s lacrosse team playing against Binghamton and Johns Hopkins in the first and second rounds of the NCAA national championship tournament on Friday and Sunday. In between, on Saturday, I attended a special curator lead tour of the latest exhibition at the Yale University Art Gallery – prints by Edvard Munch and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.
It was after the exhibition tour on Saturday, while waiting to join a local friend for dinner at Modern Apizza – one of New Haven’s world famous pizza restaurants – that I received an e-mail on my phone from a woman at FotoNostrum, the Mediterranean House of Photography in Barcelona, Spain.
“Dear Jill, João, Dave, and Edward,” it began. “I am absolutely thrilled to share the fantastic news with you!”
News? What news???, I thought to myself.
“Your exceptional talent and dedication have shone brilliantly in the 21st edition of the Pollux Awards,” it continued. “It brings me immense joy to announce that you are the well-deserved winners in your respective sections:
Jill Sutherland, California, USA: Winner of the Professional Section, Single Images.
Edward Elliot, New York, USA: Winner of the Professional Section, Series.
João Coelho, Lisboa, Portugal: Winner of the Non Professional Section, Single Images.
Dave Rudin, New York, USA: Winner of the Non Professional Section, Series.”
Well, I was certainly taken aback by this news. Yes, I had submitted some photos to the competition, but to be one of the top winners??? So, therein lies a tale ………..
As many of you know, there are a lot of photography competitions out there, so it can be something of a chore to decide which ones – if any – to enter. I have been receiving e-mails about the Pollux Awards by FotoNostrum for a few years, but never tried to enter it. However, one of my photo instructors, Steve Anchell, had recently suggested that I try to enter it as he thought I might do well.
The original deadline to submit images was April 28, but for some reason, I let it pass. I was still away on my trip to visit family in Nevada, and I guess I didn’t want to be bothered with having to go to the trouble of choosing what to submit and then to submit it. However, the deadline was then extended to April 30, so I thought to myself, “Okay, why not?”
There was one major problem, though. All of my photos were on my computer at home, while I was away in Nevada. The only photos to which I had access were the ones on my laptop computer and on the 2 TB external drive that I use for storage on the road – and I regularly delete the photos on them to create space to add new photos that I make.
What did I have left? From my art nudes, only the photos that I made one day in April when I photographed models Anoush Anou and Carrie Turner in Ohio with my friend Dave Levingston during my trip to see the solar eclipse (I plan to make a blog post about that) and the photos that I made in Nevada last month with Katie Marie (as seen on my recent blog post). From my travel photography, there were only the photos that I made in Venice the first two weeks of February this year during the Carnevale.
So, not a lot to choose from.
Of those, the photos that I made with Katie Marie were of prime importance, as the reason that I even brought the laptop computer and the drive with me to Nevada were to save and edit the photos of Katie. If not for that, I may have just left them at home.
Regarding my having only a limited number of photos that I could use, perhaps in a way it was a blessing in disguise, as I would have probably had a difficult time deciding which photos to submit if I had access to almost 29 years of photography as I do here at home.
The competition has four sections – single image and series (professional) and single image and series (non-professional). I am definitely not a professional, so I would enter the non-pro sections, but what should it be – single or series? Ultimately, I decided to enter both, from my art nude and travel photos – three nude photos (the maximum for the basic entry fee) for the single image section and a series of six (again, the maximum for the basic fee) from my travel photography. For my art nudes, even though I believe that I created some beautiful images with Katie in the desert, I chose to submit three photos from Ohio as single images because I believed them to be more unusual. As for the travel photos, entered as a series, as all I had were photos from Venice, I could only submit photos from Venice. Among those, I chose photos of people celebrating the Carnevale, rather than streetscapes, and I entered them in the People category.
So, how does this competition work? Basically, each section has a number of categories – 21 for single images and 18 for series – and for each one of those, a winner is selected plus a number of honorable mentions. Of those 21 and 18 category winners, an Overall Winner is selected for each of the two sections, single and series.
When I submitted my images, I realistically hoped that one of my submissions would at least get an Honorable Mention. After all, with a lot of images being submitted, what are the chances of getting to win a category? To then be a winner among the winners? Even more of a long shot!
Well, I guess you never know what might happen – and the fact is, someone has to be chosen as the big winner, so why shouldn’t it be me??? I would have been very happy if I had only won the People category, which I did, but to be named as the Overall Winner was certainly a great surprise, and I am certainly happy that I was. (Of course, I like to think that the quality of the images that a person submits has something to do with it, too.)
Regarding the photos of Venice, there were loads of photographers there to make photographs during the Carnevale. I feel certain that many of them – perhaps even most – were professionals with big, expensive looking lenses. I also told some people that I was probably one of the few photographers there photographing in black & white, and I wondered how my photographs would ultimately be used – so winning this competition confirms for me that I did the right thing by spending so much time and putting in so much effort to photograph the event.
Back to the competition, while I only received a notification of my having been chosen as the Overall Winner in the Non-Pro Series section, after looking through the catalog of selected images online, I saw that the three nudes that I submitted also were awarded an Honorable Mention in their category.
If you’re interested, you can see the Non-Professional winners here and the Professional winners here.
Besides getting shown in the catalog, there’s more. The e-mail also said that my photos will be included in the winners’ exhibition to be held in Barcelona this summer, and that the costs involved in printing and sending over my photos will be covered by FotoNostrum – so hopefully before too long I’ll be able to say that my photos have not only been published internationally, but exhibited internationally, too.