Jan 25 2006
Russia
With all the activities around movies.ameanet.org I had almost forgotten that I am a juror for photokonkurs.com,
so instead of looking at the pictures daily to slowly form an opinion on the posted photographs, I now found myself
in a situation where I had to judge 500 photographs in two days. That is a lot of clicks on thumbnails and it is almost
irresistible to skip pictures that have a thumbnail that is uninviting, but that is a mistake I have made once and will
never make again. In general I always thought that the size of the picture did not really matter that much in photographs. I feel that is partially true too, because blowing up a picture will make the observer take one or two steps back, but the composition stays the same. Years ago working as an magazine editor I would judge slides on a light box and examine them carefully with a loupe but I mostly ended up picking the ones that caught my eye at first glance.Thumbnails on servers however are being automatically generated by modules such as GD1 and GD2, or with any luck with ImageMagick that delivers the best results. GD1 in particular, but to a certain degree even GD2 really screws up digital images while forming a thumbnail.
So, it was a lot of work but it was fascinating again. Of course forum type contests attract a lot of photographers who would do best to stay away from a camera and naturally there was the inevitable load of photographs digitally manipulated into illustrations.
I think 70% of the photographers at photokonkurs.com are Russian and that shows. Religious devotion for instance is a theme rarely found in contemporary photography, but there are a lot of portraits of people in prayer at photokonkurs.com, thanks to a century of communist suppression of religion, but the most fascinating part about judging Russian pictures is the fact that they show both the old Russia and the new. The old Russia is fading fast. (At least in the photographs..) The pictures of women in three overcoats working on the railways with temperatures way below zero are rare. Instead we see pictures of heavily armed police squads moving into buildings step by step, we see limousine Lada cars and glamorised nudes. It is a pity, but then again; I never liked travelling in the first place.