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Sony World Photography Awards 2017
The subject of the first round for the 2017s student competition of the Sony World Photography Awards was "Memories".
My photograph "The Tutu" got shortlisted amongst the 10 best student works in photography worldwide.
Project description
Since the age of three, Sarah Schrimpf, the photographer of the submitted image, practises classical ballet dancing. Being still a nursery school child at that time, she remembers an old wooden wardrobe standing in her former ballet school. It contained all the beautiful tutus for the performances. Wearing one of these was an only privilege for the older dancers of the school already performing on stage. When one of these dancers stood ages in front of the open wardrobe to choose her tutu, it seemed as though this person got absorbed into it. Out of the ballet school's training room, Sarah/the observer, had only a sideward view on the scene, meaning, that the dancer was nearly always completely covered by one of the wardrobe doors. What was going on behind? For the observer, it felt like a secret. Many of the dancers tried on the tutu already between the wardrobe doors. While changing their training clothes against the tutu, the observer becomes a witness of a metamorphose. Finally fully dressed, the dancer often only stepped just a little backwards from the inside of the wardrobe to do a ballet pose in her tutu to get an impression for its fit. During this pose, the wardrobe door still covered the rest of the body. You could only distinguish the dancer's legs wrapped into the beautiful fabric of the tutu. This small movement created a magical moment. It is this feeling in this very second of this first glance, the submitted image wants to bring back to live. This memory looks like a warm-coloured, painting-like, slightly blurry, still image in the photographer's head which she re-creates in this work. Nevertheless, even 20 years after this experience, for her, it has nothing lost of its fascination. There is this moment of excitement when the dancer re-appeared behind the wardrobe door and the photographer thinks as well quite often about this butterfly-like transformation.
>>> For the photo shoot, Sarah Schrimpf went back to her hometown to the original place of this memory. In some way, this photograph was also a journey back to her roots. As the original location had changed a bit, some elements had to be rebuild by the photographer for the photo shooting to regain the former charm and appearance of the place.
©SarahSchrimpf 2018