The preselected entries for the 13th edition of the Pink Lady® Food Photographer of the Year 2024 competition, which celebrates the best food photographs and films from around the world, have been revealed.
The awards are taking shape, but we’ll have to wait until June 4th to know the winners. A little over 700 photographs out of thousands of images submitted from over 65 countries have been preselected for the Pink Lady® Food Photographer of the Year 2024 competition. Spread across 26 categories, they will now be analyzed and scrutinized by the jury chaired this year by food photographer David Loftus and composed notably of Asma Khan (chef, presenter, and author), Fiona Shields (photo editor for the Guardian), and Rein Skullerud (photographer at the World Food Programme).
From work in the fields to restaurant kitchens, moments of tasting, life, or even survival, this preselection offers a panorama of the impact and importance of food in our lives.
With impressive technical mastery, these images depict scenes as varied as they are powerful. “Peter enjoying his Scotch Broth by the fire with his dog, Seoras” by Susie Lowe, preselected in the “Food for the family” category, reveals in a soft chiaroscuro a meal scene near the fire in a Scottish farm in the Perthshire region. It shows Peter simply enjoying a Scotch broth, a traditional Scottish recipe passed down through generations, facing his dog who looks at him longingly. On the other side of the globe, David Cotsworth takes us to a street in Hanoi with an image this time devoid of humans but full of colors. “Side street Hanoi,” competing in the “Unearthed® Food for Sale” category, features an old rusty bike serving as a support for a tangle of pineapples, clementines, grapes, and exotic fruits.
The multiplicity and diversity of the presented categories provide a means for photographers to reveal the extent of their imagination and artistic universe. Preselected for the “MPB Award for Innovation” category, “A rice cracker eclipse” by Julien Mazille presents a simple rice cracker that, worked on by the visual artist, takes on the appearance of a planet in effusion. “I always strive to create visuals that say a little more than what they seem to say. […] We can try to give the viewer a spectacle that is not only aesthetic. Even in food photography,” details the candidate.
A spectacle also offered by Seersa Abaza with “Figgy Sweet Cake Temptation,” competing in the “Tiptree Cake Award” category: a polished image in which the green, orange, and red hues of a fig cake drizzled with syrup contrast with the soft white of the setting and utensils. On her part, Alana Dimou’s “Tomato cans,” selected in the “Claire Aho Award for Women” category, combines Warholian aesthetics and intimate history. She describes her work by explaining: “My Egyptian mother once told me: ‘My mother used to say that you will never starve if you have a can of tomatoes in the pantry.’ The beauty of canned foods is often admired for their packaging and labeling design – in this case, I wanted to emphasize the textures and abundance of tomatoes in a familiar setting, praising this essential ingredient in Egyptian cuisine.”
An exhibition of all the finalist images will be presented at the Mall Galleries in London from Wednesday, June 5th to Sunday, June 9th, as part of Plate! St James’s, a new festival celebrating food, drinks, and photography from June 5th to 23rd.
Find out more visit:
www.pinkladyfoodphotographeroftheyear.com
