Congratulations to Moscow-based Alexander Gronsky, born in Tallinn, Estonia in 1980, who began working as a professional photographer in 1998 and joined the agency Photographer.ru in 2003. He was awarded the prize for his series ‘The Edge‘ which makes superb graphic use of large areas of white snow on the outlying parts of habitations in Moscow and Pastoral, looking at wastelands within the city, areas that are not rural nor urban, areas that lack definition.” These show them in use for various purposes by people (and ducks), abandoned and wrecked buildings, dumped rubbish, fires…
Edgelands around our towns and cities have often held a fascination for photographers, including Ray Moore who taught me a great deal and myself, and some of these scenes (not the ones with snow) remind me of areas I’ve walked in around the suburbs of London and Paris, a kind of liminal zone where normal life perhaps breaks down slightly and almost anything would happen, and that heap of clothes under a bush in the distance could just be a body.
You can also see these two projects, along with his ‘Less than 1‘ (the average population of the outer Russian areas in which those pictures were taken and some of his editorial work on his web site.
Congratulations also to runners-up Keliy Anderson-Staley, Off the Grid; Alejandro Cartagena, who got a mention recently as a ‘discovery’ at Fotofest, Lost Rivers; Maureen Drennan, Meet Me in the Green Glen; Jason Hanasik, He Opened Up Somewhere Along the Eastern Shore; and Mark Lyon, Landscapes for the People, which looks at some rather remarkable interiors with wallpaper landscape.
For once it’s a competition where I would almost certainly have come to the same conclusion as the judges, although I found almost all of the work interesting.
