dot-art x Open Eye Gallery Analogue Photography Competition Exhibition 2022
dot-art teamed up with Open Eye Gallery in March 2022 to create an Analogue Photography Competition for both amateur and professional photographers based in the North West. There will now be an exhibition of analogue images from the competition submissions, runners up and winner.
This collaboration was to platform and celebrate local film photography and the dot-art Darkroom, established in the past year in the historic Cotton Exchange building. The Darkroom is equipped to process and develop black & white film prints and can be accessed on a hire or membership basis. At dot-art they also run a series of courses on Darkroom techniques and analogue photography aimed at beginners to intermediate photographers.
The competition came with the award of 3 months membership to dot-art’s city centre Darkroom & Artist Membership, a one-to-one crit session with Open Eye’s Programme Assistant as well as the lead feature in this 1-week exhibition on Open Eye Gallery’s Digital Window Gallery.
After a judging panel consisting Open Eye Gallery’s Director Sarah Fisher, Programme Assistant Declan O’Connoly, dot-art’s Founder and Manging Director Lucy Byrne and Gallery Manager Claire Henderson examined the 25 submissions to the competition, the panel selected their favourite images.
Discussing the skill, subject, and darkroom techniques of each submission it was decided that Chun-Mei Wang was the winner of this, the first year of the competition. Chun-Mei Wang’s winning submissions were part of her Darkroom Project, ‘White’. Interested in social structures and the cultural performances we engage in within them, Mei created gelatin silver prints, translating the concept of white into the relationship between image, light, subject, object, shape, and shadow as there is no substantial white during the printing process.
Mei also submitted images from her series ‘Called’, a photographic study of Beitou, a suburb of Taipei and Mei’s hometown. Due to gentrification, Taipei has transformed into a flourishing city. By photographing the landscape, she explores what details are embedded in this place and what traces remain of the history before the colonisation of Taiwan by Japan over a century ago.
dot-art and Open Eye Gallery are proud to platform the passion, innovation and quality of analogue photography in Liverpool and invite the public to view this exhibition featuring all the competition submissions on the Digital Window Gallery in Mann Island outside of Open Eye Gallery from Wednesday 13 – Sunday 17 July.
Find out more about the dot-art Darkroom here: dot-art.co.uk/darkroom/
Featured Image: Chun Mei Wang – White
