2012 may still be in its infancy, but it’s already shaping up to be a busy and exciting year for us here at Statement. If you follow us on twitter or elsewhere there’s a chance, just maybe, that you might have heard of our new members call. The submissions are rolling in and I can say we’re very much looking forward to going through them. But if you like to leave things to the last minute then fear not, you have until 12pm GMT on Friday 20th January 2012 to get that submission in. So no more dithering, don’t think about it, just do it and see what happens.

If you’d like to read some background info on Statement before making your submission then you can find out more about us in this profile on the excellent Fototazo website.

So that’s looking to the future, but what are we up to now? Well all of the current Statement photographers are busy working on new projects and ideas. Although it’s too early to share details just yet, we can update on what a few of the members have been up to.

Robert Ormerod has a 5 page spread in the January edition of Amateur Photographer magazine which you can seen at the bottom of this post. The article includes an interview with Rob and featured work from his Red Road project which can be seen in multimedia form here. The project was selected as part of the Press Photographers Year 2011.

In what has been quite a busy month already, Rob also contributed a 6 page article with photographs on Edinburgh for the current in flight magazine of Sri Lankan Airlines (see right), and had images accompanying an article by Peter Ross in the Scotland on Sunday.

Finally, Rob has had work included in two books. The first published by the Missouri Photo Workshop includes images from Rob’s project ‘The Resurrection of Eddie Troy’. The second book, which also includes work by fellow Statement member James Dodd, is published by the Magenta Foundation. Both Rob and James received honourable mentions in the Magenta Flash Forward Emerging Photographer 2011 selection. The book can be purchased (alongside a pdf preview) from the Foundations website.

Here at Statement we have many discussions between ourselves about alternative funding models, reaching different audiences, and how to utilise the multitude of platforms and formats out there (think galleries, books, editorial, broadcast, online, and social media). With this in mind James Dodd has posted a short piece on his decision to move away from Flickr and about why photographers post work online in general. Expect to see more articles surrounding the changing face of photography from James in the future.

In terms of showcasing work, Sunday Morning Sales, the project on carboot sales by James was recently featured by Fraction Magazine. The edit on Fraction’s site contains images not shown before.

Finally, at the top of this post is a short video produced by James featuring everything he ate in the first 6 months of 2011. The project started after he experienced dietary problems in 2007 and his doctor advised him to keep a food diary. Speaking about the project he said “Feasted is a photographic exploration of the simplest terms, and while at times it may hint to my tastes and life style, its sole aim is for me to discover the root of my dietary issues.” You can see read more on his website here.

When not working on projects and commissions, Statement photographer James Dodd is involved in running street photography website Street Reverb.

The site has recently been holding a competition with the support of Sony Ericsson Xperia Studios. Finalists were provided with a Sony Ericsson Xperia ray handset and asked to complete a new body of work around the theme “Reality remade”.

In support of the competition James also featured in a video with fellow competition judge Peter Dench talking about street photography with the Xperia.

The finalists have completed working on their projects and the winner will be announced soon.

See the Street Reverb website for more details.

Statement photographers James Dodd and Robert Ormerod both shoot weddings, we thought we’d get them to talk about some of their experiences:
“Wedding photography tends to get a bad rap in most photography circles. I’ve spoken to many photographers and with most it seems wedding photography is almost seen as an easy option, a way of selling out or admitting defeat from “real photography” and that the photographers themselves are selling out.

Personally I don’t view it in this way. Wedding photography is some of the most difficult work I do and is almost a perfect training ground for my personal work.

A good wedding for example contains a mixture of portraiture and candid moments, it brings skills of reading events before they happen, anticipating the moment and thinking on your feet. They enable me to try new things which I can take to my personal work and I can bring things to them from my personal work.

I think because I’m not solely a wedding photographer, and because I only shoot a handful each year, weddings stay fresh and don’t appear as much like work to me. Obviously working with Ben [James shoot's weddings with fellow photographer Ben Roberts] makes it so much easier as we’re able to constantly help each other out, trying new things whilst the other gets the more expected stuff. It’s also great to have someone about you can have laugh with.

I find that weddings are truly joyous occasion and to be present and to be paid to document them is something I would never have expected to be so much fun. But I do enjoy them and look forward to each one I shoot. “

James Dodd
jayandben.com

“There seems to be a formula in wedding photography set by many years of precedent regarding what people expect from your pictures:  Moving away from this formula and producing something interesting is always a constant challenge.

Although most weddings are set around the same structure, each day is different and involves it’s own unique challenges.  In my opinion weddings constitute a life changing milestone and there are some great moments which are just waiting to be documented.  I think of it as being given access to go in and record these moments just as I would shoot any other photo journalistic story.  There are some great themes to follow and convey visually like growth and fulfillment as a person as well as the possibility of new life.

Before each wedding I get inspired by looking at some great photography in general.  I don’t think you can draw a line between wedding photography, photojournalism and documentary.  I believe it to be fundamentally the same thing so I like to look at work by photographers who think along similar lines.

There is an old expression which goes something like: “photograph a funeral like a wedding and a wedding like a funeral.”  I don’t exactly follow this to the letter but I think there is definitely a useful message there: in other words try to break the mold… or better yet create your own. ”

Robert Ormerod
robertormerodweddingphotographer.com

October 17, 2011

Fight Night

Mixed Martial Arts Fight Night
Tumwater, Washington USA
October 15, 2011
Photos by Tom Hyde

Nearly 2,000 people paid $25 or more to crowd into an indoor arena for a night of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) fights. The amateur fighters hailed from regional gyms. This relatively small event still had the feel of an underground sport which, until recently, all of MMA was to some extent. Now it’s big, big money and its popularity is spreading internationally.

In this small city in the Pacific Northwest, black chain-link fencing surrounds the fight ring in the center of the spare complex. Folding chairs sprawl out across the concrete floor of the former indoor Go-Kart track as heavy metal blares from loud speakers. Patrons shop the tables along the walls for the latest MMA clothing, posters, dvds, books, magazines, fight paraphernalia, trading cards and action figures.

Mixed martial arts (MMA) is a full contact combat sport that allows the use of both striking and grappling techniques, both standing and on the ground, including boxing, wrestling, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, muay Thai, kickboxing, karate, judo and other styles. The roots of the sport go back as far as the ancient Greek sport of Pankration. More modern roots can be found in the Brazilian sport of Vale Tudo. The sport came to North America in 1993. At one time vilified for its no-hold violence and brutality, major organizers of the sport cleaned up the act over the past decade by instituting new rules aimed at minimizing the most serious injuries and pushing for regulation. MMA is now a sanctioned sport in 45 U.S. States. The U.S. Army now has its own sanctioned MMA events.

In just the past five years, MMA has jumped from an underground sport to one of the hottest new entertainment powerhouses complete with clothing lines. And in 2010, pay-per-view MMA events in the United States raked in estimated figures in the hundreds of millions in gross sales putting it on par with boxing and wrestling. In fact, with younger viewers, MMA has likely surpassed boxing in popularity.

It is both a burgeoning cultural phenomena and a major new emerging business market. The Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), the largest of the commercial MMA ventures, has an estimated worth of $1 billion to $2 billion on Wall Street. Already a player on the world stage, the goal of the UFC is to expand the sport into India and China in the coming years.

In 2011, Nike started a new MMA division for its sports clothing line and began endorsing fighters.

Broken noses, broken ribs, blood on the white mat and hurt pride were on the fight card Saturday night as the young contenders fought their way up hoping for a shot at the pros and big money.

Tom Hyde is a photographer living in Washington State, USA.

Submissions are now closed. Many thanks to everyone who submitted. An announcement will be made in due course.

DEADLINE FOR NEW MEMBER SUBMISSIONS HAS BEEN EXTENDED UNTIL 12PM GMT FRIDAY 20 JANUARY 2012

Call for new members

Statement Images is opening its doors to new membership applications. We are looking for motivated individuals who have an interest in the people and stories around them; who want to communicate their unique ideas through photography, film making, multimedia and the written word; and who would like to help us shape the future development of Statement in exciting new ways.

If you are interested in joining the collective, then please submit your portfolio (along with a link to your work), and a written statement to:

ku.oc.segamitnemetatsnull@nioj

Deadline for applications has been extended to 12pm GMT on Friday 20 January 2012.

Successful candidates will be selected by current members and a final decision will be announced in early February 2012.

Submissions guidelines:

Digital submissions should be sent to ku.oc.segamitnemetatsnull@nioj.
You should submit at least 2 feature stories. Each feature should take one of the following forms:
i: A photographic feature consisting of no more than 20 images.
ii: A short film no longer than 10 minutes.
iii: A multimedia presentation no longer than 10 minutes.
Email submissions with a greater attachment size of 5MB should be sent via a service such as: www.yousendit.com.
The resolution of each digital image should not exceed 1000 pixels on the longest side.
Images should be in JPEG form with compression of 8-10.
Submitted images should be numbered sequentially, in the order you wish them to be viewed and contain your name. eg: photographer_01.jpg etc.
Images should have captions/descriptions where appropriate, included via meta information or a separate file.
Video submissions should be made via web link on services such as www.vimeo.com/ or DVD entries (please contact ku.oc.segamitnemetatsnull@nioj for a postal address).
Please be sure to include a statement about your work, a resume or bio and any current contact information.

About Statement Images

Statement Images is a collective with a curiosity for the world which they wish to explore through imagery, whether still or moving. The primary objective of the collective is to offer a support framework for it’s members and to encourage collaborations and knowledge sharing.

The collective launched in 2009 and aims to meet the challenges of a rapidly changing industry by supporting its members and helping them bring stories with purpose to a wide audience.

Olympic Dreams in Amateur Photographer

August has been a busy month for Statement members. So here’s a round up of all the latest goings on.

James Dodd’s project Olympic Dreams was named as Anthony Bannon’s Juror pick in the Daylight Magazine/CDS Photo Awards. Dodd’s project was selected in the ‘Work in Process’ category by Bannon who is the Director of the prestigious George Eastman House, the oldest museum in the world dedicated to photography and based in New York.

Update: The exhibition for the awards, including an image from Olympic Dreams is now open. The exhibition runs September 19th – December 22nd 2011 with a reception opening on October 4th, 6-8pm. The exhibition can be found at Porch and University Galleries, Center for Documentary Studies, Duke University, 1317, W Pettigrew St, Durham, NC 27705.

Olympic Dreams was also featured in the July issue of Amateur Photographer magazine. The images were accompanied by an interview with James talking about how he approached the project and about his photography in general.

Red Road featured in BJP

Robert Ormerod’s Red Road project, which has already been shown as part of the Press Photographers Year 2011 exhibition and published in the Sunday Times, featured in the August issue of the British Journal of Photography. The work is also included in an exhibition about the Red Road flats organised by the Scottish Press Photographers Association at the Hidden Lane Gallery in Glasgow. The exhibtion runs from the 3rd to 30th September.

Mark Lomas has been busy editing footage and composing music for a series of short ‘in competition’ videos filmed in collaboration with James Dodd. The films focus on young paralympic hopefuls and were made for Disability Sport Events, English Federation of Disability Sport and Nationwide to mark one year to go until the start of the Paralympics in London. Videos featuring Meggan Dawson-Farrell and Tom Minchington can be seen on Statement Images here.

Amongst the successes and hard work we do have to announce some sad news however. Founding Statement Images member Gary Taylor has decided to move on from the collective. Gary is currently working outside of the photography and film making field and we wish him well for the future.

When I was first starting out as a photographer it used to be common place on trips abroad, or even on days and nights out, for my partner to point out that I should put the camera down and enjoy living in moments that I’m trying to capture.

Admittedly, as I’m sure many photographers do, I often got carried away especially when the subject is something visually exciting. As I became more immersed in visual imagery and this argument continued to pop up it got me asking: what am I trying to capture here?

For many photographers the process of image making is not simply a way to make a living and you can’t simply draw a line between time spent working and time off as might be the case in other professions. For many of us it can be a process of developing as a person. Indeed many projects seem to fall into the category of “voyage of self discovery”.

For me I think I take pictures of my life because I’m still trying to understand myself and my style. It’s similar to when you write things down and they become clearer. Although, at the same time perhaps, there is an element of trying to hold on to my youth: to capture moments in order to hold on to them.

But on recent trips I began to see my partners point: there can be a point that your enjoyment of life can be affected by constant image making and as I have grown as a person and a photographer my ability to discern when a moment is worth capturing has also grown. Most importantly, when an image is worth taking, it’s about learning to strike a balance between looking through a lens and experiencing life. It’s about letting go and living in that moment and connecting with what’s happening in front of you.

No, it’s not the 2012 games just yet, but you can already feel the hype building. Within minutes of turning on a television set we’re presented with some reference to the London Olympiad and as the months fly by you can expect nothing more than for the anticipation to rise… even if you didn’t get to buy any tickets!

One thing that struck me in all of the excitement is the increasingly visible profile of our disabled athletes. I’ve been photographing disability sport for a good few years now and have noticed this rise in media presence at some of the events I’ve attended. In addition to winning the contract to cover the 2012 Paralympics games, Channel 4 have already screened programmes like ‘That Paralympic Show and ‘Inside Incredible Athletes’.

Having a mainstream broadcaster ready to air 150 hours of coverage during the 12 days of competition raises the Paralympics from ‘niche’ to that of a major sporting event.

Advertisers seem to have taken this on board too. Those carbon fibre bladed legs as worn by Oscar Pretorius seem to flash across our screens at every opportunity. Even if the slightly cynical side of me strays into thinking companies like BP want to be seen as inclusive in their advertising so they can portray themselves as being more socially conscious, I still see the trend as being a positive one.

As someone who has worked with people with disabilities in education for 10 years now I think anything that can raise awareness and break down those barriers is a positive move. A prosthetist i’ve been filming with recently told me that many of the young athletes he has worked with are proud to show off their prosthetic legs where once they used to try to hide them away.

So back to the title of this post ‘Beyond 2012′. Myself and fellow Statement member James Dodd recently spent a weekend filming with junior disabled athletes for Disability Sport Events, the English Federation of Disability Sport and their sponsors Nationwide. The video at the top of this post is just a brief snippet from that event.

Inspired by gold medallists such as Ellie Simmonds and Sam Hynd at the Beijing Paralympics all of the young athletes we filmed with are eagerly looking at 2012 and beyond to the 2016 games in Rio. And judging by their enthusiasm I sincerely expect they’ll make it.

Yet in a sporting environment where sponsorship is vital to be able to organise and run events, and indeed compete in them, I can only hope the legacy of supporting disabled sport in Britain continues past London’s brief window of opportunity next summer, so that our future Paralympic hopefuls get the best chance possible.

As one young athlete said to me “we should get to do what ambulant athletes do, there’s no difference between us”. Which is a fair point, and with that I feel I should go back through this article and edit all of the times I’ve written ‘disabled athlete’ to just leave the word ‘athlete’.

Congratulations to Statement Images photographer Robert Ormerod who had his photo essay Red Road selected for The Press Photographer’s Year 2011.

The essay follows the lives of the residents of Red Road flats in Glasgow. Red Road is Scotland’s main centre for accommodating asylum seekers who have recently arrived in the country. It houses several hundred of a total of around 2000 asylum seekers living in Glasgow.

An exhibition of all the selected images can be seen at the National Theatre, London until 4th September 2011.

A multimedia version of the essay can be seen here.

A torn remnant of an American flag with a personal message written to Kurt Cobain lies along the muddy banks of the Wishkah River and under a bridge once frequented by the reluctant rock star in the hard luck milltown of Aberdeen, Washington USA. The bridge has become an unofficial shrine to the fallen Cobain.

Statement photographer Tom Hyde’s photo essay “After the Fall” recently received an honorable mention and was listed as one of the top 30 submissions in the Emerging Photographer Grant sponsored by David Alan Harvey’s Burn Magazine and awarded by the Magnum Cultural Foundation, a non-profit created by the members of Magnum Photos. The essay will appear on Burn Magazine (www.burnmagazine.org) in the coming year. Judges for the 2011 grant were Trent Parke, Narelle Autio, Maggie Steber, and Barbara Strauss.

After the Fall is an exploration of the greater valley where the photographer lives in Washington State USA, an area best known for clearcut logging, rain, the birthplace of Kurt Cobain, Nirvana and Grunge music, and the cultural aftermath of unsustainable resource extraction.

“I find one of the most difficult things to do as a photographer is to be able to step back enough to see with fresh eyes those things you see everyday in your own backyard,” Hyde said. “This work is a first step in a long-term personal project.”

Hyde joined Statement Images in 2010. He has a background in conservation, environmental policy and journalism.

A new multimedia piece by Statement Images photographer Robert Ormerod is being featured on the Sunday Times website. Focusing on the lives of asylum seekers in Glasgow the work was first printed in the Sunday Times ‘Spectrum’ magazine in March.

You can view the multimedia essay on Statement Images here.

The opening will include a talk from the Scottish refuge council and aims to bring attention to the pressures facing asylum seekers and mental illness inside the asylum system.

Robert will say a few words about his project and will also be available to answer questions on his work from 4pm-6pm.

More details can be found here.

The Star Gazy Boat Project.

Earlier this year I accompanied James Stier from Sheffield based production company Voidcomp to the small twin fishing villages of Cawsand and Kingsand in Cornwall. We were there to film an EU funded youth project organised by Leo Kaserer. The idea behind the project was to take a group of young people with challenging backgrounds from around Europe and put them into a new supportive environment and give them an objective to achieve.

In this case the group were challenged to restore a hundred year old fishing boat that had been left to decay for many years. The group were guided in their task by Malcolm, the last remaining fisherman in the village.

We made two trips to Cornwall to film the project and everybody made us extremely welcome. Despite the 6 am starts and long days (and a few unplanned swims in a very cold January sea) we really didn’t want to leave. Big thanks to everyone who helped us out, from those who made it possible to have the Christmas lights turned on for an evening, to Leo for putting us up at his house, to the young people who put up with us filming their every move and to the fisherman Malcolm who took us out on the fishing boat.

The film, which is currently being edited, will be used to promote the project and hopefully secure more funding so that similar events can happen in the future.

Working very much on the fly the crew, featuring camera operators Gary and Mark with support from James Stier and Paul Oxborough, filmed the narrative parts of the video at various locations throughout the city. This included a key scene in The Little Flower Shop on Abbeydale Road. Many thanks to them for not only allowing us to use the premises to film but also for being game enough to feature in the video!

The single ‘Godless Girl’ is out now with the band’s debut album ‘Chasing After Ghosts’ following on the 21st March. The band will be touring the UK and Europe from March until the end of May.

Video Directed by The Crookes

Girl – Kirsty Elizabeth Huzzard

Film by Statement Images.

Mark Lomas – Camera/Editing
Gary Taylor – Camera Assistant
James Stier – Assistant Director
Paul Oxborough – Gaffer