Honorable Mention
The statue
DESCRIPTION
The main challenge in this type of contest is to choose among dozens of photos the one you consider as being your "best" photo and hope to be among the finalists and possibly get an award for your work. I leave the choice to the jury to appreciate the artistic and technical quality of this picture. I chose "the statue" because it best reflects the recent evolution of my style and the way I work in artistic nude photography. First of all, it is the result of team work because a good friend of mine, a photo artist and lecturer, coached me with lighting, natural light for the most part. Second, the choice of color. This picture is also available in monochrome but this color version reflects the atmosphere of the moment and location much better. Third, the location. After having worked in many classical studios with paper backdrops, I now work more and more in less traditional studios to be able to create a story more easily around the picture, here a factory in Budapest that has been transformed in several studios, each one with its own theme. Fourth, the square format that is not used that often in photography allows me to eliminate what is superfluous in the picture and focus on the story. When retouching, my idea was to integrate the model as a statue in the floral setting. The credit for this photo certainly goes to Dorka, a talented model based in Hungary. I asked her to improvise and she chose this pose inspired by the special atmosphere in this studio. AUTHOR
Eric’s career in nudes photography started when he moved to Germany in 1990. He bought a photo magazine in which he found an ad from Kerstine, one of the best amateur models at that time. She and Eric met and organized many shootings in the 90s. During this learning-by-doing period, he also bought many books from famous photographers, including Helmut Newton and Jeanloup Sieff. They have probably influenced his work since.Eric learned high-quality nude photography with the professional German photographer Arboulan in the late 90s. In 2004, he started to work with the Hungarian artist Szeni Jung who was facilitating the so-called Sebesviz workshop. He then decided to start his project Venusonearth, including his own website, being a member of photo communities, and working with some of the best amateur models in Germany, Hungary and other European countries. Eric’s first ambition was to get printed in the French magazine PHOTO. He first succeeded in January 2007 and got printed eight times since. After a longer break, his main project in 2012 - 2017 was a portfolio of nudes with Julia, a German student, who became his first muse. During this longer period, his approach was to capture her development both as a model and as a woman.
Today, Eric has worked with more than 100 models and succeeded in getting international recognition, including PSA gold medals, honorable mentions, jury choices and many acceptances. Juries from Trierenberg in Austria, the German Open Circuit, or Riedisheim in France have also valued his work. The best way to describe his passion is a quote from Richard Avedon: “If a day goes by without my doing something related to photography, it’s as though I’ve neglected something essential to my existence, as though I had forgotten to wake up“.