WOW Pinoy

Vicente Jaime Villafranca photojournalist is Ian Parry Prize winner

Written by Ms. Confuse on Saturday, August 23, 2008

Freelance photojournalist Vicente Jaime Villafranca is the winner of the prestigious 2008 Ian Parry Prize.

Villafranca bested 172 photographers from all over the world for the scholarship prize, awarded in memory of Ian Parry, a British photojournalist who died in 1989 at age 24 while on assignment for the Sunday Times of London during the Romanian revolution.

Villafranca’s winning entry was a portfolio of 12 black-and-white images of gang members of the “Chinese Mafia Crew” living in the Baseco compound in Tondo.

Last year Villafranca won the “Everyday Islam” photo competition sponsored by the British Embassy and Newsbreak magazine. He won the first prize for “School Bound,” his photograph of four schoolgirls in Tipo-Tipo, Basilan, taken soon after the ambush and beheading of Marines there last year.

The winner of the Ian Parry Award is automatically accepted by the World Press Photo into its final list of nominees for the Joop Swart Master Class in Amsterdam.

Villafranca plans to use his prize money of £3,000 ($5,900) to fund a project in Burma.

Villafranca obtained a degree in Fine Arts, major in Advertising Arts, from the University of Santo Tomas. He also studied at the Asian Center for Journalism at the Ateneo de Manila University.

Photos by Vicente Jaime Villafranca courtesy of the Ian Parry Scholarship.

Source : GoodnewsPilipinas

Marc Aviles a photographer gets special honors in intl. competition

Written by Ms. Confuse on Tuesday, August 05, 2008

Marc Aviles of This is iT Photography of Santa Clara, California received special honors in the Wedding & Portrait Photographers International (WPPI) 2008 WPPI8 x 10 1st Half Print Competition. Design to recognize outstanding photographers, the judging was held in Santa Monica, California last month.

Aviles's winning prints included:

• "untitled" received First Place in the Landscape / Nature category.
• "Valley of Fire" received Second Place in the Landscape / Nature category.
• "Together" received an Accolade of Excellence in the Engagement category.
• "Waiting" received an Accolade of Excellence in the Animals / Pets category.
• "Armageddon" received an Accolade of Excellence in the Illustrative / Editorial category.

Aviles competed against an international field of photographers to win such honers. The WPPI 8 x 10 1st Half Print Competition awards are presented each year at the largest trade show, educational platform and convention in the United States for professional photographers. The 2008 competition included 932 prints in 18 different categories submitted by photographers from all over the world.

Official Site of Marc Aviles

Emmanuel Santos - "The Passing of Light"

Written by Ms. Confuse on Thursday, June 12, 2008

A Filipino photographer based in Melbourne, Australia, set the record for the most expensive set of pictures sold at the recent Christie’s Southeast Asian Modern and Contemporary Art auction in Hong Kong.

“The Passing of Light” by Emmanuel Santos, which comprises 38 black-and-white pictures measuring 26 x 26 inches, was sold for US$44,000 (P1.9 million).

It’s the highest on record for Philippine contemporary photography and Southeast Asian photography. They were a combinaton of first- and second-edition prints.

They were exhibited at Silverlens Gallery in Makati last September.

The work’s subject: angels common to the Torah, the Koran and the Bible.
“There are 72 angels, both good and bad, and he has made photographs of 38 of them over the last 10 years,” says Isa Lorenzo, owner and curator of Silverlens Gallery.

Santos, born in 1957, grew up in Sagada, Mountain Province, and moved to Australia in the late ’70s where he established himself as a photographer of the Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Melbourne.

In Manila, he was a photographer for the United Nations.

He is one of the foremost photographers of the Jewish Diaspora, and his work has featured in Jewish and Holocaust Museums worldwide.

Santos’ work is special because he has been able to document customs and traditions of the very private and little-known Hassidic community, such as a group celebrating the festival of Purim, where “the community celebrates with wild abandon—Santos filmed children dressed as clowns, as Father Christmas, and one boy even dressed as a Palestinian terrorist,” reported the Melbourne paper The Age in 2003.

“As you know, photography is huge as contemporary art elsewhere. And we are only in its infancy here in the Philippines and Southeast Asia, but we are going to get there,” says Lorenzo.