Between April and May 2007 the Refugee Week Team organised a photography competition on the theme of Encounters. The competition was won jointly by Alan Gignoux and Shamin Shettuba. The winning images, and shortlisted entries, were displayed in an exhibition during Refugee Week at the Nolias gallery, Southwark.
The aim of the Photography Competition was to continue to explore new ways and forms of reflecting and relating to the refugee experience. In using Encounters as the theme of the competition - and linking it with wider plans for Refugee Week 2007 - our intention was to invite a wide range of both professional and amateur photographers to comment on how people of different backgrounds come to change and influence one another through their meetings and interaction.
The amazing diversity of people who responded to our call exceeded our hopes and expectations in more than one way. The entrants did not only send their images in great numbers and from various parts of the UK and the world (US, Singapore, Lebanon, Australia, Thailand, France, and Germany among others), but also ranged from well established and award winning photographers to young asylum seekers who have just arrived to the UK.
This diversity of the entrants’ backgrounds, nationalities and photographic experiences was also matched by the diversity of their interpretations of the brief, with encounters taking place in a whole range of contexts and situations. A few examples of this include an encounter between two team mates on a Liverpool football pitch where British people and refugees come to meet and interact by playing football, submitted by an established UK based photographer; a recently arrived young asylum seeker approached and photographed a group of three London dustmen; another asylum seeker captured a group of uniformed British school children mingling in a school yard; Palestinian refugees returning to their birthplace to encounter their “home” and their past, were photographed by a British Council sponsored photographer; a young photographer who told us a story of her first encounter with snow, which took place shortly after her arrival in the UK.
The images displayed on this page aim to embody and reflect this wide range of thematic and visual approaches and backgrounds. The judging panel agreed that the winning entries come to successfully represent the two ends of this remarkably wide and colourful spectrum of interpretations, ideas and experiences.
Please click here to see the other shortlisted competition entries.
