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Jessica Eaton wins the Hyeres photography prize

Jessica Eaton

British Journal of Photography

4/30/2012

Canadian photographer Jessica Eaton wins the Photography Jury Grand Prize at the 2012 Hyeres Festival of Fashion and Photography.
by Diane Smyth

Jessica Eaton has scooped the Photography Jury Grand Prize at the 27th International Festival of Fashion and Photography in Hyeres. Eaton won for her series Cubes for Albers and LeWitt, which also won the Bright Spark Award organised by Magenta Foundation last summer and appeared on the front cover of BJP in March.

Eaton, who wins a solo show at next year’s Hyeres festival, uses simple rectangular gels and multiple exposures to make the images, which are shot on 10×8 film. “I started working with the tri-colour process in 2004 or so, having found it in an old Kodak photography manual,” she told BJP in the article The Perfect Playground in March.

“I was often frustrated by the extreme primaries and secondaries the process achieved in more simple practice, while knowing intellectually that the additive colour theory it employs was capable of producing all of the recordable tones when in registration. I was interested in the process and wanted to find a way to have more control over it…It is like no matter what I do, at least I did something that says that analogue photography can be something else – that doesn’t have to be intrinsically bound to the visible world. It is full of possibility.”

Eaton was picked out of a shortlist of ten photographers by a jury which included: photographer Jason Evans; Wallpaper* photography director James Reid; Time photography editor Kira Pollack; and FOAM deputy director Marcel Feil. The other photographers on the shortlist included UK-based photographers Richard Kolker and Manuel Vasquez. Two other photographers on the shortlist also won prizes, with Namsa Leuba winning a Photo Global scholarship to The School of Visual Arts in New York and Florian van Roekel winning the Digital Photography LVMH Award. Check the May issue of BJP for more information about the judging process and to see images by all ten shortlisted images.

The Hyeres Festival of Fashion and Photography is now open at the Villa Noailles on the French Riviera until 26 May. it includes an exhibition of the ten shortlisted photographers plus solo shows by Jason Evans, Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, Paolo Roversi, Anouk Kruithof and Ina Jang.