Dubai: Photography enthusiasts around the world can now start sending their entries to the sixth season of the Hamdan Bin Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum International Photography Award (HIPA) which carries a bigger prize money this season.
Ali Bin Thalith, secretary-general of the Hamdan Bin Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum International Photography Award (HIPA), on Monday announced that the secretariat will start accepting entries from around the world until midnight October 31.
“After five years of extensive work spreading the art of photography to tens of thousands of people around the world and, in turn, reaching photographers from 193 countries around the world, HIPA has steadily amassed one of the most impressive and diverse photographic communities on the planet,” Bin Thalith said.
Bin Thalith said this season’s theme was chosen to further push photographers and enthusiasts to grow and be limitless in their chosen craft.
“The HIPA photographic community has in this time also grown to a level where we now feel we must ‘challenge’ them more to continue their development and increase their passion for the art form.”
Entries for ‘The Challenge’ category should convey “the theme in a clear manner either in the way the photograph was shot or in its content and subject matter”.
And because digital manipulation of photographs has become so common nowadays that it “has become an art form of its own”, HIPA has also introduced a new category on ‘Digital Manipulation’. Entries for this category should be an “out-of-this-world image that is both convincing and realistic”.
The third category, Portfolio, invites photographers to tell a story through photographs while the fourth is ‘General’.
Already dubbed the world’s richest photography award, the secretariat further increased its total cash prizes from last year’s $400,000 (Dh1.4 million) to $423,000 this year.
“This will no doubt push photographers to work harder and submit their photographs earlier than previous seasons, which will not only develop photography skills but the encourage them to concentrate on the thought process involved when submitting. The new deadline will also allow us to focus on the judging process a lot more as well, which is no doubt an added advantage,” Bin Thalith said.
The total grand prize winner will still receive $120,000 this year. The prizes for the four other categories are still the same except for the ‘General’ category, which is now divided into two sub-categories: three winners for the black and white entries and three winners for the coloured entries.
Bin Thalith said HIPA will also introduce more extensive educational programmes throughout the next few months. Among these is the ‘Portfolio Week’, a week-long course for photographers under the tutelage of some of the best-known photographers such as world famous photographer and adventurer Michael Yamashita, Dubai-based architectural photographer Catalin Marin, as well as Kuwaiti photographer Abdul Aziz Al Duwisan.
For more information on the workshops and how to send an entry, visit http://www.hipa.ae/.
