Jim Goldberg wins Deutsche Börse Photography Prize

Jim Goldberg, who works for Magnum Photos, has scooped this year’s Deutsche Börse Photography Prize with his exhibition Open See, which documented the lives of immigrants and refugees from war-torn countries as they began anew in Europe.

He beat Thomas Demand, Roe Ethridge, and Elad Lassry to the £30,000 first prize at the awards ceremony last night. As runners-up, they each walked away with £3,000.

Brett Rogers, director of the Photographers’ Gallery which hosted the event, described Goldberg’s approach as ‘timely and inventive’. You can go look for yourself until Sunday 1 May as the winning series, together with the runners’-up pictures, will be exhibited at Ambika P3, at the University of Westminster.

Focus on Imaging 2011

The NEC, Birmingham. 6 to 9 March 2011. Just about anyone who’s anyone when it comes to cameras, kit, and pictures will be there, from manufacturers to printers, from software companies to publishing houses. There will also be talks and workshops taking place, too. It’s Focus on Imaging 2011. It’s Europe’s largest imaging show.

Last year over 37,000 people tramped through the exhibition. That’s, well, the population of a medium-sized town. (Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk springs to mind.) With over 200 stands this year, all those people, and so much shininess (including, I believe, the Fuji Finepix X100) there’ll be plenty to hold your attention.

Trade admission is free, but you need to register before you go. If you’re not trade, it’s £8 if you book in advance. Many, many more details (and booking facilities) on the Focus on Imaging website.

The 1,096 face collage

Have you ever wondered what Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus might look like if it were a collage composed of 1,096 images of people? Well, Samsung, together with the artist Samira Harris and photographic contributions from people affected somehow by breast cancer have created it.

It is part of Samsung’s ‘Everyone is Art’ project, which aims to bring support to people across Europe whose lives are affected by breast cancer. They picked the number 1,096 because that’s how many people are diagnosed with breast cancer every day in Europe.

The images were uploaded to Samsung’s ‘More than talk‘ project in September this year, before Harris used them to compose her collage. It was unveiled at a rather glitzy event last Thursday.

Now, I might not be able to raise massive sums of money for charity by doing it, but I wouldn’t mind having a go at creating a giant collage a bit like that.