Here are just a few tips to help you but it doesn't guaranty that you will win!
There are so many photo contests that sometimes it is difficult to know exactly what to do. We will try to give you a few advices.
Choose the contest that is right for you:
Even if it seems obvious, don't participate in all the contests you can find on the internet. Select them carefully. For instance, choose the good subject. The theme of the contest has to be relevant with your body of work. Try one's luck in a contest were you can send images that match the subject. Also, check the level of difficulty. If you are an amateur keep in mind that you will have less chance to win a professional contest. Of course you can try but just try to remain realist in your expectations.
Carefully read the rules and regulations:
Some photographers tend to forget to read the rules and regulations but it is very important. You need to know what you are allowed to do or not, check out the rules about copyright if you don't want to have a nasty surprise. In some cases you will see your work in catalogs without you knowing about it. Be also very cautious with entry fees. Some contests are very expensive but it doesn't mean that it is more reliable or serious than a free contest.
How is your image judged?
Sometimes by vote, sometimes by a jury and sometimes both when there are several stages. In the contests were the public vote it is often the photographers who have more friends who win. You's better be a good salesman than a good photographer. I would recommend to avoid these types of contests unless you think you have a really good chance. I prefer the contests where professionals judge your work. First of all because it is the best challenge there is. If a panel of jurors like your work you can be proud. It is sometimes a good idea to try to find who are the judges so that you can try to find what type of work they like. It can help you choose an image over another if you feel it is more likely to be liked by that juror.
The choice of the image:
There is no miracle recipe but pay attention to a few things.
*Check out the previous winners it can give you an idea of what the judges are looking for. *Keep in mind the theme of the contest. if your image is just slightly relevant to the theme you have less chance to win. *If you are submitting a portfolio make sure that the images tell a story or that there is a real link between them. In other words don't send images that don't go well together. *Be original. Competition is hard and a jury will be more likely to notice your work if it is a little different than others. *If you want to participate in a specific contest but you don't have in your stock an image that would fit, don't hesitate to create one. It is a good challenge and the chosen theme might inspire you in a new way. *If it is a contest with votes, submit your images as soon as possible. The earlier the better. If the contest is judged, no rush! Take time to choose wisely. *Prepare clean files or prints. Read carefully what the guidelines. Check out if your image is going to be printed on paper or judged on a screen.
An expanded chronology charting Todd Hido's career, with ten years of new work.
Well known for his photography of landscapes and suburban housing, and for his use of detail and luminous color, acclaimed American photographer Todd Hido casts a distinctly cinematic eye across all that he photographs, digging deep into his memory and imagination for inspiration. Newly revised and expanded, Intimate Distance: Over Thirty Years of Photographs, A Chronological Album includes ten years of new work since the book's first publication, including breathtaking new images from his travels to Iceland, Norway, and Japan, where he brings both a familiar eye and an expansive new vision.
Though Hido has published many smaller monographs of individual bodies of work, this gathers his most iconic images, along with many unpublished works to provide the most complete and comprehensive monograph charting his career. The book is organized chronologically, showing how his series overlap in exciting ways. David Campany introduces the work and looks at the kind of cinematic spectatorship the work demands. And Katya Tylevich muses on the making of each of Hido's major monographs, "The photographs lead as far as human-made roads go. They reach the periphery of utility wires, footprints, and paths already taken." From exterior to interior, surface observations to subconscious investigations, from landscapes to nudes, from America and beyond, this midcareer collection reveals how his unique focus has developed and shifted over time, yet the tension between distance and intimacy remains.
The life’s work of one of the most important photojournalists of our time, covering major events in American history from the 1960s to present
Stephen Shames is an American photojournalist for more than five decades. In his award-winning photo essays, he draws attention to social issues such as child poverty and racism. During his career Shames authored numerous books, among others Power to the People: The World of the Black Panthers and Outside the Dream: Child Poverty in America. Kehrer Verlag is now publishing a comprehensive book containing many unpublished photos. Although Shames photographed many diverse subjects including presidents from Kennedy to Obama, activists and visionaries like Martin Luther King or Stephen Hawking, and people from countless cultures, there is a thread connecting his pictures: Shames’ photos of children and families focus on what tears us apart and binds us together: violence and abuse, but also love, hope, and transcendence. The images come from his heart and soul.
Travelling widely, Ralph Gibson works primarily in inspired series, associated image reveries in both monochrome and colour, whose titles―The Somnambulist, Déjà-Vu, Days at Sea, and Chiaroscuro―underline the particular poetic sensibility that informs his work. Starting out in 1960 with Dorothea Lange, he made his way to New York in 1967 and was soon considered in the same light as the likes of Larry Clark and Diane Arbus. The photographs and series can of course speak for themselves. But for Gibson there is a philosophy at play behind the image, and in the included short texts he proposes his thesis. Nudes, portraits, still lives, narratives―loyal to his Leica, Gibson ranges between genres and creates new categories of vision. He gets closer to things and meditates on them in a way that only the silence of the image can attempt.Produced in close collaboration with the artist, this book offers the fruit of more than six decades of image-making. From Gibson’s first photographs in San Francisco, Hollywood, and New York in the 1960s right up to the present day, this is the most comprehensive collection of this highly acclaimed photographer.
An unflinching exploration of aging from one of the twentieth century’s most influential photographers
For more than half a century, Richard Avedon sought to represent advancing age in the faces of the people he photographed. From his earliest years at Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue through to the twenty-first century, Avedon routinely and audaciously broke the rule of flattering public personalities in his portraits. Instead, he chose to highlight the onslaught of what he called the “avalanche of age,” dramatizing the universal experience of getting older.
Accompanying a groundbreaking exhibition at The Image Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University and The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Immortal is the first book to delve into Avedon’s unflinching representation of aging throughout his career.
This elegant hardcover volume features nearly 100 portraits of cultural luminaries, each printed in striking tritone, such as Michelangelo Antonioni, Truman Capote, Marcel Duchamp, Duke Ellington, Toni Morrison, Patti Smith, and Stephen Sondheim, as well as one of Avedon’s last self-portraits. Texts by a star-studded cohort of authors, including Vince Aletti, Adam Gopnik, Paul Roth, and Gaëlle Morel, shed new light on an under-represented element of Avedon’s practice.
Thoughtfully edited and beautifully produced, Immortal testifies emphatically to the determination with which people confront the relentless advance of mortality.
