Australian fine art photographer, Ben Thomas, has won the prestigious Hasselblad Masters 2018 Street/Urban Category.
The winning images are from the Victorian photographer’s Chroma project. Two images were captured at Coney Island, New York, and another from Florence, Italy.
‘Chroma is building on my ongoing study on how we perceive and interact with the urban spaces that surround us. This builds on my previous projects – Cityshrinker 2007, and Accession 2012 – which utilised specific mechanisms to deconstruct the places where we live,’ Ben told ProCounter.
‘The treatment for Chroma is something I worked on for over a year, before the first image was published, and over the last three years I refined it as the project evolved. Primarily, the images feature block colours and smoothed shadows to bring about an almost illustrative aesthetic that moves the images almost into the abstract.’
The contest received a 175 percent increase in entries this year, with a total of 31,500 images submitted. Fellow Australian photographers Glenn Hunt, Zoe Wetherall and William Dielenberg were finalists in the contest.
Ben, along with the nine other Hasselblad Masters winners, will be brand ambassadors for two years and receive a medium format camera, as well as invitations to shoot collaborative projects with the Swedish camera manufacturer.
The rules allowed photos to be captured on any type of camera. Each entrant had to be a professional photographer for at least three years – excluding the under-21 category.
‘I shot the majority of the series on a Canon 5D Mk III with a combination of Sigma prime Art lenses and Canon zoom lenses,’ Ben said. My workflow is Adobe-based with the majority of treatment being undertaken in Lightroom. Some minor detail correction work is then refined in Photoshop.’
The contest runs every two years.
Here’s the full list of winners:
Aerial – Jorge de la Torriente – Miami, USA
Architecture – Kamilla Hanapova – St. Petersburg, Russia
Art – Maria Svarbova – Bratislava, Slovakia
Beauty & Fashion – Michal Baran – Trim, Ireland
Landscape – Benjamin Everett – Lopez Island, USA
Portrait – Tina Signesdottir Hult – Torvastad, Norway
Product – Marcin Gizycki – Warszawa, Poland
Project//21 – Nabil Rosman – Kota Bharu, Malaysia
Street / Urban – Ben Thomas – Kyneton, Australia
Wedding – Victor Hamke – Leipzig, Germany
Wildlife – Karim Iliya – Haiku, USA
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