UAL Olympus UK Photography Award 2018 – Second Edition

OLYMPUS and the Bermondsey Project Space for the second time support the next generation of photographers from UAL*.
February 2018 will see the second annual Olympus Photography Award given to current University of the Arts London students.
Responding to the theme Photo Evidence: Between (Media) Representation and Reality, students were asked to submit work in three categories – Print, Projection and Multimedia – and the winner of each category will receive professional equipment from OLYMPUS.
The selected 23 finalists will exhibit work that places the artistic process in relation to the surroundings where students develop their skills and research and will showcase the many ways in which practitioners are using photography today.
The exhibiting artists are: Rafael Morales Cendejas, Tammy Smith, Marie Cognacq, Emily Thomas, Lara Orawski, Mine Cemre Ozer, Nicolas Alberto Canal Tinius, Penny Hartley, Maria Clara Lorusso, Rosie Haynes, Thomas Hywel Cardew, Anastasia Alekseeva, Kateryna Shevchenko, Bianca Trombi, Jo Kimmins, Elizabeth Reid, Alexander Harding, Fabio Rovai, Jiwon Choi, Luca Strano, Marcin Nowak and Sarah Hollebon.
University of the Arts London is in the top five universities in the world for art and design –comprising Camberwell College of Arts; Chelsea College of Arts; Central Saint Martins; London College of Communication; London College of Fashion; Wimbledon College of Arts. It offers an extensive range of courses in art, design, fashion, communication and performing arts. Its graduates go on to work in and shape creative industries worldwide.
*UAL has launched the careers of many creative and cultural leaders:
• Over half of all Turner Prize winners and nominees in the 30 years since its inception are UAL alumni
• 37 of the 80 Royal Academicians are UAL alumni; a further 17 are serving or former staff
• Over half of the recipients of British Designer of the Year are UAL alumni
• 10: the number of UAL alumni who are current Royal Designers for Industry for product or industrial design
• Over half of the fashion designers that showed at London Fashion Week A/W 2016 are UAL alumni
• Multiple winners in the most prestigious art and design awards: from the BP Portrait Award; Jerwood Prize; Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize; Minerva Medal; BAFTAs, Golden Globes and Oscars

Congratulations to the three winners of the UAL Olympus Photo Award 2018:

Print:

The last primeval forest, Białowieża, by Marcin Nowak, London College of Communication
“Over a four month stay in the forest with activists in the protest camp, I realised first hand that the Polish government manipulates evidence, media and leads to misrepresentation. I have decided to show a set of three pictures as one image, for me it represents the relations between evidence media, representation and reality.”

Multimedia: 

El Cine Cubano, by Nicolas Alberto Canal Tinius, Central Saint Martins
“Until the Cuban Revolution succeeded in 1961, my family owned cinemas across the island.As a result of the revolution, they were exiled, the cinemas became property of the government, and subsequently decayed steadily in the forthcoming decades.
The images used here come from ‘Cine Cubano’ (1967), a magazine which highlights revolutionary activity in the cinema.Within it, they reject cinema of the time as “almost always reactionary cinema” – reactionary being in opposition to political and/or social change.”

Projection: 

Waterfront, by Anastasia Alekseeva, Central Saint Martins
“I approached the project by taking long walks and observing the world around me and then choosing to focus on particular aspects which drew me. It was interesting to observe that once you remove an element from its context it opens itself up to boundless narrative potential, which in this case I explored through adding sound to the footage I shot.”

 

 

 

 

Featured Image: Lara Orawski from her project Fractals