Awarded annually in recognition of the best student photograph in Architecture, The Simon Devitt Prize for Photography is now in it’s eighth year. This year’s theme is the ‘Final Frontier’. The finalists have been selected and will be exhibited as part of the Auckland Festival of Photography Fringe Programme.
Opening
5:00pm
Tuesday 26 May
Exhibition
27 May – 6 June from Wed – Sat
11am – 4pm
Elam Projectspace Gallery
Ground Floor Main Fine Arts Building
20 Whitaker Place
Auckland Festival of Photography details »
Photo credit: Winner 2014, Alice O’Brien-Gortner, Extinguished
The winner of this years Simon Devitt Prize for Photography competition is Alice O’Brien-Gortner.
The annual competition, now in it’s seventh year, was established at the Auckland School of Architecture and Planning.
O’Brien-Gortner, a third-year Bachelor of Architectural Studies student, receives a trophy and $1000 prize money after her image was chosen from a field of twenty finalists.
This year’s theme was The In-Between and I selected Extinguished as the winning entry because this is where the image seems to live.
There is a highly evocative sense of ‘another’ place we get when we experience this photograph.
O’Brien-Gortner has created an imagined world that perhaps raisers more questions than it answers for the viewer.
Her photograph leaves us in a challenging and uneasy place, wondering how we arrived.
A selection this years best entries are on show until 7 June as part of the Auckland festival of Photography.
The 2014 Simon Devitt Prize for Photography Exhibition
28 May-7 June
Foyer, Conference Centre
The University of Auckland
22 Symonds Street
Samuel Wong is the winner of this years prize for his entry ‘Rider’.
My description of his winning entry:
“The winning photograph left me in no doubt. Its a picture I wish I had made myself. The sense of the uncanny, the surreal and a poetic nod to the theme are all captivating characteristics of the winning photograph. The winning entry reveals a deceptively ambiguous narrative that held my attention and begged re-visiting. Its success rests, uneasily in between the everyday and the otherworldly.”
