Amanda Renshaw I have enormous admiration for people who can make an image out of nothing that, in turn, takes us on an emotional or intellectual journey. Great art is not the same as reality. It might depict reality and teach us about reality, but it is not the same. Great art transcends the immediate and the now. It might capture disparate people within the same frame, thus making us pay attention to their differences. It might create characters from scratch and evoke emotions that we recognize, but that are heightened by the pose, the colour, the context created in the image. If a photograph merely reproduces reality, however beautiful or impressive that reality might be, it does not make it a great photograph. When I vote in these awards, I do not read the text until I have looked at the photographs. Sometimes I do not read the text at all. The photographs have to captivate me and be strong enough to make me care about the subject, to make me feel, question, wonder and then, most essentially, take my thought process on a journey. THE LANGUAGE OF THINGS transcends the objects that are photographed. These photographs make me look harder. And isn’t that what photograph is about? They make me wonder and imagine what these objects are. They make me dig into my memory of the things that I might have seen before that are familiar. I can imagine an extensive book of photographs of 1000 basic objects that are used around the world, photographed in this way, by this photographer. Bound together
re-photography of objects in a space reconstructed after collecting them at Paengmok Port in Jindo, where the Sewol ferry accident took place. The ferry Sewol of Cheonghaejin Marine Co. capsized and sank near Jindo County, South Jeolla Province, around 8:50 a.m. on April 16, 2014. It was thought that abandoned objects could be expressed beyond their nature, implying non-visual language, not to end up in mere imitation or reproduction. The objects in the work are imitations of the objects as a result of their intrinsic symbol and are internalized by making them think deeply through photographs.
