Australian photographer, George Byrne, has won the second Minimalist Photography Awards for three photo collage images taken from his series, Exit Vision.
But first what exactly is the Minimalist Photography Awards? They are organised by the Black and White Minimalism Magazine, a bi-monthly online mag, and include 12 categories with an overall winner picked by an esteemed judging panel.
Minimalism is a visual arts movement which, according to the UK’s Tate Modern, is ‘an extreme form of abstract art developed in the USA in the 1960s and typified by artworks composed of simple geometric shapes based on the square and the rectangle’. The Minimalist Photography Awards have no rules or requirements outlining what constitutes minimalism, or the judging panel criteria, however Byrne’s winning photos are most certainly minimalist!
They are part of an ongoing series, where Byrne constructs collages with urban and landscape elements captured from various locations. The photos are shot on medium format film.
‘For the Exit Vision series, I would look for ready-made vignettes of colour and form in the built world around me, and then try and repurpose or reinvent them. By embracing the process of photo-assemblage or collage, these photographs have become creations as much as they are observations.’
The Sydney-born photographer has been based in Los Angeles since 2011, and he creates large-scale photos that ‘depict everyday surfaces and landscapes as painterly abstractions. ‘Borrowing from the clean, vivid clarity of modernist painting, he also references the New Topographics photography movement via a subject matter firmly entrenched in the urban everyday.’
Byrne’s three photos were picked from an entry pool of 4200 images, submitted by photographers from 41 countries. He wins US$2000, and the title of 2020 Minimalist Photographer of the Year.
He also won the Photo Manipulation category, as well as scoring second place in the Fine Art and Abstract categories. The remaining categories include Aerial, Architecture, Conceptual, Landscape, Long Exposure, Night, Open Theme, Portrait and Street.
Here’s a selection of winning images.
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