Jessica Eaton wins the Jury Grand Prize at Hyeres Festival of Fashion and Photography

Canadian photographer Jessica Eaton has won the Photography Jury Grand Prize at the 27th International Festival of Fashion and Photography in Hyeres, France. Eaton, who is based in Montreal and holds a BFA in photography from the Emily Carr Institute in Vancouver, won for her series Cubes for Albers and LeWitt.

Eaton’s photos are fascinating and look like they could be paintings or the result of some kind of digital artistry, but they are entirely analog and are constructed on 4×5 film using simple rectangular gels and multiple exposures. The subject in reality is monochromatic. The photographs use a set of cubes and ground options painted white, two tones of grey, and black. Through multiple exposures the colour hues in each image have been made by exposing the film to the additive primaries of red, green and blue. The reflective value of the cubes controls the value or lightness of that hue, and the black is utilized as a type of reflective mask, holding potential on the film for other exposures.

“I started working with the tri-colour process in 2004 or so, having found it in an old Kodak photography manual,” Eaton told the British Journal of Photography in a recent interview. “I was often frustrated by the extreme primaries and secondaries the process achieved in more simple practice, while knowing intellectually that the additive colour theory it employs was capable of producing all of the recordable tones when in registration. I was interested in the process and wanted to find a way to have more control over it… It is like no matter what I do, at least I did something that says that analogue photography can be something else — that doesn’t have to be intrinsically bound to the visible world. It is full of possibility.”

Eaton was picked out of a shortlist of ten photographers by a jury which included: photographer Jason Evans; Wallpaper* photography director James Reid; Time photography editor Kira Pollack; and FOAM deputy director Marcel Feil. The other photographers on the shortlist included UK-based photographers Richard Kolker and Manuel Vasquez. Two other photographers on the shortlist also won prizes, with Namsa Leuba winning a Photo Global scholarship to The School of Visual Arts in New York and Florian van Roekel winning the Digital Photography LVMH Award. Check the May issue of BJP for more information about the judging process and to see images by all ten shortlisted images.

The Hyeres Festival of Fashion and Photography is now open at the Villa Noailles on the French Riviera until 26 May. it includes an exhibition of the ten shortlisted photographers plus solo shows by Jason Evans, Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, Paolo Roversi, Anouk Kruithof and Ina Jang. Visit the festival site for more details at www.villanoailles-hyeres.com/hyeres2012/.

[via the British Journal of Photography]