Last Thursday in the Library Athaeneum, students assembled to hear the announcement of the 2007 off-campus studies photo contest. Naomi Ziegler, the OCS assistant director, started off the event with a brief description of how the selection process worked. This year, 140 students submitted photos from their study abroad programs all over the world. A panel of three judges narrowed this field down to twenty-five finalists. From these finalists they selected the winners for People, Place, and Story. The finalist photos were also put up online so all Carleton students could vote for the People's Choice award.
Some of the finalists came up to the stand and told the stories of the misadventures they had to go through to get their photos.
Alyssa Hursh got an internship in Paris as a photographer's assistant through IES (Instutute for the International Education of Students). She says that after the photographer took a look at her portfolio, he concluded that there weren't enough pictures of people in it, and told her that that fall, she would be taking pictures of nothing but people. Her picture of "Stranger on the Metro" was obtained only with difficulty. In Paris, "you're not supposed to look at people on the Metro." Alyssa had to pretend to look somewhere else and take the picture in secret.
Ali Happli took her picture, "Una Chica Florida," on an off-campus program in Madrid, also through IES. The title means "a flowered woman," and the young woman in the picture is definitely flowered. She was a model for some Dutch artists who work entirely in flowers. They made four dresses out of flowers and had women walk down the street median in them to advertize their work. This photo was taken at about 1 a.m. on Noche Blanca, a festival where people commonly stay up all night.
Colin McLain took "Chinese Empire" on the Carleton Political Economy trip in Beijing. Though the program is named after Beijing, the students were not limited to that city. On spring break, Colin and some of his friends had the opportunity to travel, so they decided to go as far as they could without leaving the country. Kashgar, where this picture is set, is on the far western border of China, about twenty miles from Afghanistan. They had just come back from a bazaar and ran across this man on his donkey cart. Colin especially liked this photo because of the contrast between the traditional and the modern, embodied by the young people fixing a bicycle.
Amanda Smith took "La Dune y el Sol" on the IFSA Butler program in Valparaiso, Chile. She, too, had some time free from her studies and decided to travel. She and a friend biked five kilometers to Valle de la Luna in northern Chile. The bike ride up the mountain was arduous, but once they got to the top, they were able to watch a spectacular sunset and take photos like this one of the trail below them. The problem was that once the sun was down, there was no light to help them navigate the trail back down. Fortunately a friendly park ranger found them and gave them a ride.
Finally, Ziegler announced the contest winners. They are as follows:
Place: "Salida del Sol," Abigail Baum
People: "Metro," Alyssa Hursh
Story: "Fitz Knees," Mimi Rojanasakul
People's Choice: "Fitz Knees," Mimi Rojanasakul
A separate competition, sponsored by the library, was for photographs of libraries in other parts of the world. Its winner was Connor Cole, for "Nkqomqweni School Library."
