Ian Parry Award winner
There are lots of young photojournalists out there trying to find a market and get themselves noticed and one way to do this is to win the Ian Parry Award, no easy task mind you.
Ian Parry was a photojournalist who died while on assignment for The Sunday Times during the Romanian revolution in 1989 aged 24. A scholarship was created by Aidan Sullivan and Ian's friends and family. Each year, young photographers who are either attending a full-time photographic course or are under 24 can submit work. Previous winners include Harriet Logan, Simon Roberts, Marcus Bleasdale and Ivor Pricket.
This year's winner is Maisie Crow, who is a graduate of the School of Visual Communication at Ohio University and currently an intern at the Boston Globe.
Maise's project is entitled Love Me, and portrays the life of a 17-year-old girl, Autumn (not her real name), who lives in a small town in Ohio with her parents. Maisie describes her project as an exploration of "coming of age in an environment that lacks the emotional and financial resources to facilitate her growth into adulthood."
The pictures are all in colour and shot around Autumn's home, typical scenes of family life, but with an undercurrent of unease. I can see why the judges, who included photographer Eugene Richards, Simon Bainbridge from the BJP as well as Stephen Reid and John Jones from the Sunday Times, chose Maisie's work.
Eugene Richards said of the judging process:
"Everyone in that darkened projection room came to agree that the winner of the Ian Parry had to be someone who was expressing a "personal vision," as opposed to a more generic, commercially viable one."
It seems to be a recurring theme of this blog, personal vision, and Maisie is well on her way to developing hers. The full set of Maisie's winning pictures can be seen here.
An exhibition of Maisie's work, plus that of Ed Ou whose work was highly commended by the judges, and others is on show at the Getty Images Gallery in London from 5 August for one week.
You can read more about the Ian Parry Award on their website and see Maisie Crow's portfolio on her site.
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Ye gods, those are creepy pictures. You can't tear yourself away from them though. Superb work - a very well-deserved winner.
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Indeed great images they are, the USA isn't all paved in gold
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Not sure what all the fuss is about, to be honest. Technically very accomplished, but some of the pictures are very bland.
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They look posed, to me, to be honest. I make no doubt they are real people (and, to be honest, some of the most memorable images of the American working classes have been posed - Dorothea Lange springs to mind) but somehow, with these ones, I can hear the photographer's voice in the background going "Stop smiling. Stop smiling. Look sad. You're working class: I'm here to chronicle the awefulness of your lives." I wonder, did 'Autumn' see any more of the money, from these photos, than Florence Owens Thompson did, when she became The Face Of Poverty?
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Fantastic, you can almost taste the atmosphere, hauntingly apprehensive to the eye.
Thank you.
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The photograph of Autumn's younger brother shouting into her ear at the dinner table is absolutely incredibly - I couldn't bring myself to move onto the next image!
Truly deserving winner.
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Amazingly evocative shots of American poverty and its effects on the young - just one example of such a big, largely unseen, underbelly.
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Welcome to the US equivalent of (suburban) council flats.
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These are good photos but I agree that they are staged.I have been poor in America before and people still laugh and can be happy.What was so bad about their lives OH NO not a trailer! with electricity,food ,shelter,clothing.and comforts of modern technology.I know people who live in a trailer It's not the end of the world sadness these photos make it out to be.
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Not bad, but overall not really impressive, and certainly not award worthy. However, the imagery and situation does again prove an age old issue in mid-west working class America though, it shows that these people would rather put their faith in Jesus than in education.
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Any one of these people who lost their cool and yelled at a cop would be arrested, and without a Harvard lawyer to bail them out they wouldn't be out having a beer with the president. The USA has tens of millions of poor who deserve a fair shake. Race preferences hold them down.
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Maisie is no doubt a deserved winner of this prestigious prize.
So often we celebrate photographers who do little more than cannibalize other cultures and ways of life. They barely skim the surfaces of the lives they portray, but the otherness they represent is somehow more appealing to photo editors than the stuff close to home.
Maisie should be congratulated for exploring something close to home and approaching it with cold journalistic intent.
Much more than a photographer she is also one of best producers of multimedia. You can see a short film she made about living with Prader-Willi syndrome here: http://duckrabbit.info/blog/2009/08/maisie-crow/
Its in a class of its own.
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Haunting and sad. This is where resources need to go in uplifting the dreary conditions of America's children. Capitalism is dead in America because it had no conscience.
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This is a great "artistic" piece, but think about WHY we should tolerate such poverty and depression in such a rich country as the USA!! This should be a call to action, not musings about how quaint, realistic or "how photographically compelling" it is. This reality needs to be changed--NOW!
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She avoided the three cars, video games, and flat screen TV. Nice work!
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Faeyth
I am sure, if you read the BBC, that you have NO IDEA of this type of US poverty. I also went to school at Ohio University and was a MFA acting student in Athens for 3 years. Part of my training was touring schools around Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana. I was appalled at the level of poverty. Athens County is the poorest county in Ohio. The poverty is palpable and endemic and hard to get out of. I believe what's depicted in these photos. It's a ridiculous argument to make that just because their trailer would be someone's stable home in another country that these people aren't suffering and shouldn't be helped. It's all relative isn't it? Just because some poor family in India would love to have a trailer in Athens, Ohio and eat canned peas and wonder bread for dinner, doesn't minimize this kind of poverty.
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I am an American, I have lived and worked all over the country at one time or another. I can tell you, this culture of poverty is everywhere. You won't see it on the popular TV shows, just like Mexican TV never shows the life of Mexicans with brown skin. I say culture of poverty because it is largely a state of mind. I know many poor Americans, and my experience is that many of them spend an inordinate amount of time watching TV, reproducing far beyond their means to support a family, eat low-quality food, which is often quite expensive in terms of nutrition per dollar. It is commonplace that they are religious fanatics, believe in government conspiracies, mind-control drugs being spread by commercial aircraft, astrology, ghosts and a host of other nonsensical ideas which further alienate them from the mainstream. In short, a profound lack of common sense and education keeps them marginalized and segregated, in addition to the effects of multiple-generation welfare. Higher quality education would no doubt help this, but in a nation where the school systems are still debating creationism vs. evolution, don't look for a solution any time soon. And as long as the media keeps promoting the idea that McDonalds is good food, one can save money by spending on something you don't need, and that one can purchase the American dream by working at a menial job for $10 an hour, it will never change.
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This is a too true and sad depiction of not only rural America but many urban areas as well. There's no question that everyone still can laugh and enjoy life but the reality of the poverty and hopelessness is till too pervasive. The lack of quality education dooms these generations further.
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I guess there are two kinds of poverty, material and non-material. As someone who has lived and traveled extensively in the "third world" for sometime, I have to say that I don't really find this young woman's poverty extreme. These people are not starving, they live in a place that has greenery and water, and I see evidence of so many resources in the photos. I do think they are experiencing a kind of poverty, but it is more due to the limits in her/their thinking, the lack of support, and abuse. What they need is to change their way of thinking and living more than anything else, although access to good educational facilities and counseling and planning would be a huge help and money would definitely make these resources more available (although I wouldn't say changes could not happen unless there were more money).
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Technically competent, trite and judgemental.
Ye gods! do we really need a shot of the girl at a crossing to understand that the girl may be at a crossroads in her life?
The pervasive Christian iconography was effective but the image sequence didn't carry the narrative.
There are some fantastically talented young photographers around at the moment, I'm sure they could have done better or are bright young photogs not interested in photojournalism these days?
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This isn't a story about a struggling youth trying to come of age in an economically disadvantaged household! This is a snapshot of a dysfunctional family fueled on sugar and nicotine. Their laziness is a by-product of apathy and junk food. There was a time when it was a shame to have raised children with worse standards than the family dog. It’s foreign to make the connection between your introductory comments and this recorded disaster. Social services should step in to investigate.
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The thing I really like about these picture is that they really show the way that crushing poverty literally crushes people down. You see it everywhere (in the US and UK) - and in places far less poor than Ohio, talk to people and what do they aspire to? what do they hope for in the future. Very little or nothing - or just avoiding the worst negatives.
Staged or not, really poignant and captures the atmosphere of places like this and the spirit of the people living and coping with it.
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Amazing images. Some are quite surreal. A sense of sadness and they serve to show how broken the American Dream can be.
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