The winners of the sixth and final edition of the IdeasTap Photographic Award, in association with Magnum Photos, have been announced.
The selected photographers – Yasaman Dehmiyani, Emin Ozmen, Solmaz Daryani and Dominika Gesicka – will receive a grant of £2,500, enabling them to complete a body of work to be showcased at Magnum Print Rooms in London in July 2016.
Yasaman Dehmiyani, 23 from Tehran, Iran, will complete her project 34 years after the Revolution [above], a review of events in Iran since the revolution of 1978.
Emin Ozmen, 30, from Sivas, Turkey will complete his series LIMBO, shot in Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Europe, documenting the experiences and emotions of populations uprooted by conflict.
Solmaz Daryani, 30, from Tabriz, Iran, will complete her series The Eyes of Earth, investigating the environmental and human impact of the drying of Lake Urmia in Iran.
Dominika Gesicka, 34, from Włocławek, Poland, will complete her series This is not Real Life, shot in Longyearbyen, the largest settlement and the administrative centre of Svalbard – the world’s northernmost city.
The industry panel who judged the 444 entries comprised of Shoair Mavlian, Assistant Curator of Tate Modern; the photography consultant Cheryl Newman, and Magnum photographers Nikos Economopoulos and David Alan Harvey.
This marks the final collaboration between Magnum Photos and British arts charity IdeasTap, who officially closed their doors in June due to lack of funding. When we spoke to the charity’s founder and chairman Peter De Haan in March, he voiced his bitter disappointment with the perceived lack of his charity have received from the Arts Council and other government departments that deal with the creative industries. “I’m bitter because I see other organisations that play the politics, that get the money and waste it. They’re appalling,” he says.
“I can’t even get a response from Ed Vaisey,” he says of the Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries. “It’s unbelievable.”
Since its creation in 2008, more than 90 per cent of its £13m total funding came from De Haan’s philanthropic trust, the Peter De Haan Charitable Trust.
Previous winners of the IdeasTap Photographic Award have gone on to receive international acclaim, including Jack Latham, Vasantha Yogananthan and Abbie Trayler-Smith. The charity also provided funding to several other photographers now making waves in the industry, including Lewis Bush, Alex F. Webb and Tina Remiz.
