Just to give you fair warning, there is some unpleasantry. Birth defects, homelessness, stark death. But you will find joy, along with the pain.
My favorites were Elliot Ross's Animals series (those eyes!), Tyler Brown's single shot "Filamentis" (if anyone can tell me what this is a photo of i will love you dearly), Ernesto Bazan's photo book Cuba (multi-faceted wowness), and another photo book called Strangely Familiar: Acrobats, Athletes, and other Traveling Troupes.
i was also quite struck by student Ed Ou's honorable mention piece for the "Social Documentary Essay" category, Under a Nuclear Cloud. As i mentioned above, these are a bit hard to look at, but i have always been intensely drawn to the ramifications of the human race's development (and eventual use and misuse) of nuclear energy. Lastly, student Patrik Budenz's photo book Post Mortem knocked my socks off. At first i could barely look at these clear, intimate portraits of bodily death, but then i realized that this is a basic truth, pure and simple. So i began to see them through another lens, a photographer's lens. They are great shots, no doubt about it. The subject matter is (for me, at least) hard to grapple with, but i was able to set it aside, for the most part. There is still mystery in the simplicity of it all.
One of the truly amazing things about photography is the ability for those images to grab more than one individual and join them together somehow, even though geographically (and spiritually, socially) they may be thousands of miles apart. i don't doubt that there were others around the globe watching these same images along with me, and feeling their minds open up as their thoughts began to travel..... to travel..........
Anyway, here is a nice image of some daffodils (narcissus?) to make everything better. Toodles.
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