Judges Comments

This was a difficult category to judge. There were many entries that may have had one or several strong images, but none did a really great job at conveying a narrative and all needed a tighter edit. The fishing carp story has some nice frames but we wanted to see more about who the fishermen were in their time outside of the boat. The doula story showed that the photographer took time to develop trust with their subjects and time to photograph the story, but felt disjointed in certain ways. We liked the photo of the boxer on the street as it showed her environment, and in the bus, as it showed another aspect of her life. The portrait was great, but it didn't gel all together as a story or essay. The story of Macy showed the photographer spent time and stuck with the subject to show different aspects and events in her life, but there wasn't really any photo that jumped out and we couldn't figure out why the focus was on the cheerleaders and not Macy in the cheer photo.