[By consideration for the personal situation of the author, I am moving here the discussions that were not directly relevant to the original post of
http://www.largeformatphotography.in...ad.php?t=37470 Tuan]
Its worse than you can imagine. It has nothing to do with the creation of a great photograph and everything to with being a professor on a tenure track who needs to have their work published. There is a whole industry built around this to ensure professors are published and all us losers who make pretty trinket art unknowing subsidize this industry with our entry fees for these competitions.
The art that oozes out from the plastic towers of our great universities is called conceptual art which is a mix of esthetics and content. I can assure you the esthetic part is most likely to be pathetic, and the content part is always small ideas wrapped in big words like a stinking onion. The threshold for making conceptual art is much lower than creating images with esthetics that take your breath away and beyond the capability of most of these professors seeking tenure. Jennifer Little was one of the tenure track "emerging" professors that presented her conceptual art at the landscape forum at photo 3. Many people got up and walked out halfway through her presentation. Her work was exactly what I expected, and as I described above.
So if you are non tenure trinket art kind of guy who makes esthetically pleasing images then your stuff is thrown into the losers pile. It lacks content and is not worthy. Only professors who must publish and embrace coneptual art get put into the possible winning pile. How big is this industry. Well have you ever wonder why art in public places is so bad? And that is only the beginning. I can assure you if the judges are afffliated with any university you better be a tenure seeking professor to win.
So when I went up to Steve and asked him if he was going to display the winning photographs at the photo 3 conference he said "NO". Right then a there I new that the overall winner produced "junket" conceptual art and was a professor seeking tenure, and the judge was a professor from some university. If Steve Simmons hung the winning prints at the photo 3 conference, people would have been pissed off and for good reason. They were mislead! I was mislead!
Steve, if you are reading this, I would like my $109 entry fee for the competition refunded, and my fee I just paid to subscribe to your publication refunded as well.
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