We are thrilled to announce the winner of the second edition of the world’s only international potato photography competition
“There's something extremely wonderful and weird about this work. The amalgamation of vegetables and animals creates a strange portrait of the everyday food we consume. The fact that the image was taken on a polaroid camera with just a flashlight is of great credit to the photographer's skill.” Amy D’Agorne
"The wonderfully simple and delicate approach to this image has been beautifully handled" Ben Brain
“I love the simplicity of this as the gardener proudly shows off their homegrown spuds” Martin Parr
The competition was inspired in part by the photo of a potato (Potato #345 (2010)), taken by acclaimed photographer Kevin Abosch that sold for $1million in 2016. It is a splendid photograph and just goes to show there’s an appetite for potato-based photo art.
All money raised from the entries will be donated to the The Trussell Trust who provide much-needed food for people locked in poverty.
Read some of the amazing press coverage of last year's awards...
All proceeds will go to help the Trussell Trust to provide food for people in need at this time of crisis.
The Trussell Trust supports a nationwide network of food banks in the UK. It is doing this by supporting a nationwide network of food banks that provide emergency food and support to people locked in poverty, and they campaign for change to end the need for food banks in the UK.
In the UK, more than 14 million people are living in poverty – including 4.5 million children. The Trussell Trust supports more than 1,200 food bank centres in the UK to provide a minimum of three days’ nutritionally-balanced emergency food to people who have been referred in crisis, as well as support to help people resolve the crises they face. Between April 2018 and March 2019, food banks in our network provided a record 1.6 million food supplies to people in crisis, a 19% increase on the previous year.
The title of 'Potato Photographer of the Year 2021'
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Martin Parr is one of the best-known documentary photographers of his generation. With over 100 books of his own published, and another 30 edited by Parr, his photographic legacy is already established. Parr also acts as a curator and editor. He has curated two photography festivals, Arles in 2004 and Brighton Biennial in 2010. More recently Parr curated the Barbican exhibition, Strange and Familiar. Parr has been a member of the Magnum agency since 1994 and was President from 2013 - 2017. In 2013 Parr was appointed the visiting professor of photography at the University of Ulster. Parr’s work has been collected by many of the leading museums, from the Tate, the Pompidou and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Martin Parr established the Martin Parr Foundation in 2017. In 2019 the National Portrait Gallery in London held a major exhibition of Parr’s work titled Only Human. Photo credit: New Ming Chun Photo Studio, Singapore, 2007 © Martin Parr Collection / Magnum Photos
Amy D'Agorne is a Yorkshire born photographic artist who has worked for a variety of clients and on personal projects that have spanned the globe.
Her work is primarily concerned with environmental and social issues. Themes within her work address structures of power, the Anthropocene, and everyday feminism.
She is now currently undertaking her Masters in Documentary Photography at The University of South Wales and is based in North Yorkshire.
Paul was formerly a freelance photographer working regularly for The Guardian and The Observer before becoming an educator. He established the UK‘s first residential photography workshop and has written two books on the medium - Approaching Photography and Dialogue with Photography - as well as having two monographs White Peak Dark Peak and Corridor of Uncertainty published. Paul was the first art photographer to receive an MBE for services to photography from Queen Elizabeth and the first professor of photographic practice in a British university.
Nigel Atherton is the Editor of the world’s oldest consumer photography magazine, Amateur Photographer –published weekly since 1884. It continues to be the UK’s biggest selling and most prestigious photographic journal. Nigel joined the magazine in 1994 and became Editor in 2013. Prior to his magazine career, he spent seven years working as a cruise ship photographer, based in Miami and spent several years shooting stock travel photography for major image libraries. He studied photography at Plymouth College of Art & Design and the University of Westminster.
Angela is the founder of SheClicks, a community for female photographers, and one of the team behind Camera Jabber, a website for photographers with news, reviews, tips and techniques. She started reviewing cameras and photographic kit in early 2004 and since then she’s been Amateur Photographer’s Technical Editor and Head of Testing for Future Publishing’s extensive photography portfolio (Digital Camera, Professional Photography, NPhoto, PhotoPlus, Photography Week, Practical Photoshop, Digital Camera World and TechRadar).
As well as judging the first-ever Potato Photographer of the Year, Angela is one of the judging panel for the British Photography Awards and Pink Lady Food Photographer of the Year.
Benedict is a UK based photographer, journalist and founder of Brain’s Foto Guides Ltd., balancing his personal practice with developing photography enrichment programmes, tours and workshops for a range of international clients. He is an award-winning journalist and until recently was the editor of Britain’s best-selling consumer photography magazine, Digital Camera. He is regularly asked to judge prestigious photo competitions such as the International Garden Photographer of the Year and The British Photography Awards and Landscape Photographer of the Year. Benedict travels internationally as a public speaker talking about the art and craft of photography and sits on The Royal Photographic Society’s distinctions panel.
Ray Spence with 'End of lockdown'
There is one category – ‘Potato Photographer of the Year 2021’
The awards are open to anyone aged 13 and over, and all nationalities.
You can find other eligibility criteria on the Terms and Conditions page.
The competition opens in the week commencing 17th May 2021.
The closing date for entries is midnight (UTC+1) on 18th July 2021.
The overall winners of the awards will be announced on the 12 August 2021.
You can enter up to 8 images.
A single image entry costs £5 (GBP). You can buy individual entries, or save time by buying larger bundles for multiple entries to the awards
A discount on the cost of entry of 10%, 20% or 30% is available for Photocrowd Challenger, Pro or Master subscribers, respectively.
All revenue from the Potato Photographer of the Year 2021 will be donated to The Trussell Trust, a food bank charity that aims to end hunger and poverty in the U.K..
More information on the Trussell Trust can be found here
The grand prize and title of 'Potato Photographer of the Year 2021' will be awarded to the photographer whose entry is chosen by the judging panel as the overall winner. There are also prizes for the photographers who submit the second and third-placed images.
Images should be saved as jpegs at the highest quality available, with a colour profile attached. Either the RGB or sRGB colour profiles are recommended. Digital scans from film are also eligible providing they meet these technical guidelines.
It is strongly advised that you upload the largest file size that you have available. Images will be viewed at 100% by the judges, and larger file sizes will therefore be at an advantage. Whilst no image sizes will be rejected at upload, winning images may be required to be printed, and so must be of sufficient quality to allow this. As a minimum it is advised that images measure at least 2,500 pixels on the shortest side after any cropping. Where images submitted are smaller than this, it will be assumed that this is the largest image size available to the photographer, and will affect that image’s chances of winning.
There are Photoshop and other image software tutorials online that show you how to best resize an image.
We advise photographers to include as detailed a description as possible of their work during the upload process. This is a great way to tell a story or other interesting facts about your image, and the judges will be able to read this while rating to give them insight into the how you took the shot.
It is also advised to include a title for all submitted images, and these titles will be presented alongside winning images on the Awards website and in press releases and elsewhere.
We would advise all entrants to add copyright information in the metadata of all submissions.
Images exhibiting watermarks, copyright or authorship information or other information overlaid over the image will not be considered by the judging panel.
There are no restrictions regarding the manipulation of images using software or other techniques, provided that all imagery is the exclusive work of the submitting photographer and does not include any element that is the copyright of another.
Each photographer can enter the awards once, using one Photocrowd account. More than one image bundle can be purchased, but there is a maximum of 8 images that can be entered by each photographer.
There is no rule regarding how recently an image must have been taken.
No images that were shortlisted or won a prize in Potato Photographer of the Year 2020 can be entered into this year's competition. Images that were not shortlisted in 2020 can be re-entered in 2021 if the photographer wishes to do so.
There is no restriction on entering images that have previously won other awards, not including Potato Photographer of the Year 2020 (see above).
If the awards are still open for entries then at any time you can remove an entered image and enter a different one in its place. Once the deadline for entries has passed, and judging is underway, images cannot be removed or swapped out for other images.
Yes, there’s a simple signup process to register on Photocrowd, which will then give you full access to Potato Photographer of the Year 2021.
No, the Potato Photographer of the Year 2021 is an international competition and you may enter photographs taken anywhere in the world.
Photocrowd is a contest platform for the best photo contests and photo awards around, with a global community of photographers of all levels and interests.