Past IFP Photo Competitions


The International Field Program has a yearly photo contest open to all students who complete the IFP that summer.  Fellow GPIA students vote, and the winning images are professionally framed and displayed in the GPIA offices.  Below are the winners from each year's photo contest.

 

2010 Winners

 

Rennan

1st Place – Traci Oshiro, Brazil

Rennan (16 years old) was one of the students who participated in the sound project based in the Bangu favela of Rio de Janeiro. He is musician and member of Percu'som, a group combating the violence found within the favelas through culture and music.

 

 

 

Roma Child

2nd Place - Patrick D. MacLeod, Kosovo

Roma are a daily sight in Kosovo's capital of Prishtina. They are largely desperately poor. This child is seen digging through the rubbish, either for his own survival, or at the direction of his family

 

 

 

Woman at Lalibela

3rd Place - Jenna Rogers, Ethiopia

A portrait of a woman going to pray at the rock churches of Lalibela, Ethiopia

 

 
 

 

2009 Winners

 

 

 

Nepal  (1st place 2009)

Rachel Ingersoll- Nepal

 

Nepal is a post-conflict and newly democratizing country with an unstable government and a lackadaisical approach to judicial accountability. Though generally ineffective, bandhs (or closures) like this one are seen as the only legitimate form of action. These men are Maoist loyalists protesting the unsolved murder of their comrade.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Drink (2nd place 2009)

Josephine Q. Vu-- Nepal

 

The residents of Bhaktapur come down to the main square to fill their tanks for their daily or even weekly water supply.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Play in the City of God  (3rd Place 2009)

Nadia Claudi Pederson--Brazil

The pictures and words framing City of God are often those of war, drugs and crime. The children play a great part in this story. Not only are they victims of the drug trade in the favelas, they are also victims of prejudices and exclusion. These are created because of a mainstream media coverage that is often one-sided and focus on conflict. But the favelas are much more than that; they are a home for people who wish to live a normal and peaceful life. This is the story the two boys on the football field in City of God tell us: they play the happy part, which is rarely shared.



 

 

 2008 Winners

 

 

 

The reason why I'm not in school (1st place 2008)

Cinthya Marquez - India

 

Small child in a small village in Tuljapur doing chores while other children attend school.


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Untitled (2nd place 2008)

 Jen Hill - Kenya

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 
 

Girl in the Blue House (3rd place 2008)

Silvana Gramajo - India

 

She had beautiful features, and her dress was covered in a white power. In two occasions, I noticed she was looking from the distance instead of running behind us as the other children did. When I saw her again, she was immersed in deep thought inside this blue house.

 
 
 
 
 
 
  

 

 

 

2007 Winners

Tribal Village, Rural Maharastra (1st place 2007)

Eric Zuehlke - Mumbai

Even though our IFP was in Bombay, a city of non-stop activity and intimidating scale, we were able to spend one of our weekends in rural Maharastra, visiting the state government office for tribal communities, tribal villages and schools, and a demonstration against a planned Special Economic Zone. This photo was taken while visiting a village of the Thakoor tribe. Their quiet village, among lush green fields of farmland and established buildings, was a stark contrast to the one we had visited that morning that was in a much more precarious condition and obviously poorer. We sat in a dark hallway with one of the village leaders, a woman who had been elected about a year beforehand. As we sat and talked, and as they shared their locally grown cucumbers with us, I took this shot of two kids watching us on our visit.             

 

Exclusion (second runner up)

Lisa Carter - Buenos Aires

This picture was taken of a really lovely little girl in Villa Itati, Quilmes. She is standing behind a makeshift fence of old mattress springs, dirty and alone, yet she still smiled at me and had an amazing disposition. She made it very easy to capture a beautiful picture. I took this picture with [fellow student James Cerqua] on one of our final visits of the IFP and it tells so much of the amazing experience as a whole.

 

 

 

 
 

Vegetable Street Vendor (third runner up)

Eric Zuehlke - Mumbai

This photo was taken on our walk from the rented van we had for the weekend through a maze of streets and alleyways, filled with schoolchildren and street stalls to get to the demonstration site. This is just one of the dozens of photos taken that day, but this man's calm and the colors of his surrounding immediately caught my attention. Although I initially felt self-conscious and a bit wary of being exploitative or just a research-tourist while taking photos of people in India, I quickly learned that the vast majority of people liked having their picture taken. Many people, young and old, would call out to me when I walked around, asking me to take their photo and pose for the camera. 

 

 

 

To see all the photographs submitted to the competitions, CLICK HERE