Friday, November 21, 2008

No Yes Wow

Barbies © Marcela TaboadaPhotographer Marcela Taboada is a finalist in this year's Photolucida Critical Mass competition. Her work is among those pre-screened out of over six hundred entries. This image from her photo essay, "Women of Clay," was included in her entry (see Portfolio 1 on her website).

As reviewers, our job is to look at all the finalists and rate each on this scale:

NO = "Someone may be interested in this work but it's not me."
YES = "I'm glad that I've seen this."
WOW = "I can't wait to show this to someone."

For me, Marcela's images for this story are so rare and authentic I want to give the photographer a prize. Moreover, once I read her essay and artist's statement I became a bigger fan because she shot these in her own backyard in her state of Oaxaca. Many photographers feel they must travel great distances to find extraordinary subjects when they would have done better to look right around the corner.

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