Sunday, June 29, 2014

Peter DeMarco on Photo Contests and CS Lewis on Writing

DeMarco is an acquaintance of mine, living in Busan, whose photos have graced National Geographic. He was recently interviewed and asked about photo contests.  In talking about his Busan Tourism Photo Contest entry, his method of choosing one particular pic was questioned:
What made you submit that shot over all of your other awesome shots?
That was one of my favorite pictures. But again, I tried to get into the mind of the judges. First, the city’s slogan is Dynamic Busan. I think photos that show a modern, even advanced, side to the city are best. Think newer, bigger, shinier, richer, faster. The city wants to use these photos to promote Busan to tourists and foreign investors.
A photo of a woman selling fish in the market is poignant, but it’s probably not going to grace the cover of some city-made promotional material. In fact, it seems like every year photos of the city’s most modern neighborhoods or buildings like Marine City, Centum City or Busan Cinema Center win. That said, what do I know? It could all change next year and a photo of a monk at a temple could win
Some of his pictures can be seen at the link above.
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CS Lewis discussed three ways to write to children.  The first two ways consider children as a coherent bloc with identical wishes and desires.  The third way involves writing out a story that might be first been told to one specific child:

The next way may seem at first to be very much the same, but I think the resemblance is superficial. This is the way of Lewis Carroll, Kenneth Graham; and Tolkien. The printed story grows out of a story told to a particular child with the living voice and perhaps ex tempore. It resembles the first way because you are certainly trying to give that child what it wants. But then you are dealing with a concrete person, this child who, of course, differs from all other children. There is no question of 'children' conceived as a strange species whose habits you have 'made up' like an anthropologist or a commercial traveller. Nor, I suspect, would it be possible, thus face to face, to regale the child with things calculated to please it but regarded by yourself with indifference or contempt. The child, I am certain, would see through that. In any personal relation the two participants modify each other. You would become slightly different because you were talking to a child and the child would become slightly different because it was being talked to by an adult. A community, a composite personality, is created and out of that the story grows.
There is (much) more at the link.  Via Boingboing.

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