"That breaks my heart."
On Kevin Barney's Instagram, that's the first comment on what would be the Best in Show image for the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts' 2018 International Photography Competition. Entries — hundreds of them — streamed in from across the globe. In the end, the judges chose our cover photo from an Odessa man who, on his first visit to the Suncoast Primate Sanctuary about a year ago, was struck by what he perceived as the primates' despondency.
"It seems like the animals weren't happy," he says. That's when he noticed most all of them had their hands resting on — or wrapped around — the bars of their cages.
"It almost reminded me of an incarceration of something of that nature," he says.
That led to a series, Caged, of which Best in Show — and first place winner in the Nature, Science, and Animals category for the 2018 International Photography Competition at the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts.
Barney works as a professional photographer, shooting both portraits and landscapes. He also teaches workshops. This series, though, wasn't a paid gig.
"This is a personal thing I like doing," he says. "I never even thought it would win. I wanted to put it in [the photography contest] to see if it would resonate with other people."
Barney shoots with a Canon digital camera.
The other winning entries are no less stunning. Anna Grevenitis' Regard 08-13-17 won first place in the People and Portraits category. It's part of an ongoing series — viewable at annagrevenitis.me — that captures moments in the lives of a mother and daughter, daughter and family, but almost always the daughter. The mother — at least, we assume she's the mother, and, at the least, she's a mother-figure — almost always stares directly into the lens; the daughter almost never does. It's a startling use of black and white images; warmth seems to radiate from the mother, despite an overt lack of color in the images.
Raf Willems, who shot Route 66, has a birds-eye view of the world on his website, rafwillems.com. The Belgian photographer, who now divides his time between Brazil and the U.S., perfectly captured the spirit of Route 66 in this photograph — at least, the spirit of Route 66 that existed before the road got carved up and piecemealed out. While America clearly has no shortage of home-grown photographers who see the beauty and horror of the world from behind their lens, Willems proves that anyone can transcend the country of their birth to understand and capture a uniquely American moment. Route 66 took first place in the Places, Landscapes and Drone category.
Laura Howell’s Building Orb won first place in the Abstract Photography category. Howell’s photographs often look like images of sculpture on display, but no, it’s the image itself that’s the art. While this Clermont artist isn’t averse to more realistic images, like a peacock portrait, her talent for the abstract always seems to lurk just beneath the surface — take a look at a small portfolio of her work at artistsonfifth.com, a Mount Dora gallery — and you’ll find that peacock image, but you’ll also find a glorious peacock abstraction.
Abbey Matthew’s Fuzileiro Do Drosa took home the People’s Choice award. The clear contrast in colors, white against blue, clearly struck a chord. Of more than 700 photographs, judges had to narrow the winners to 22.