Photography contest, discovering the hidden beauties of Naples

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Participating in one of the many photo contests available online is easy: just find it, choose the best among the thousands of images taken with your digital camera, and submit it. You participate to win a prize, but also for the sheer pleasure of making your photograph public so that anyone can see it. All free of charge and with minimal effort, in exchange for visibility and, perhaps, a more “material” recognition. Unfortunately, an aspiring photographer often doesn’t care if organizers sometimes use the submitted photographs unscrupulously, violating copyright law and often exploiting the collected material financially. Two conditions that are usually even included in the rules!

After all, these are methods and procedures perfectly in sync with the fast and frugal times we live in, with memory stored on USB drives and the almost physical need to be present in the virtual world of social networks. And then, in the end, one consoles oneself by thinking that, after all, “everyone does it this way.”

The cultural association Photo Polis of Naples, on the other hand, proposes a contest structured differently from what we are used to. The organizers, two professional photographers Marco Maraviglia and Massimo Vicinanza with thirty years of experience, obviously aim for the quality of the work produced by the participants, but above all, they want to revitalize the concept of “photographic research, a practice necessary if one wants to effectively convey a lived emotion or truly tell a story through images. A good photograph is always the result of a project.

The contest (the deadline to participate is June 1, 2014), also supported by FullPress in media partnership through the magazineFullTravel, is open to all photographers, professionals and amateurs, including foreigners, with a call for entries translated into English by one of the many technical sponsors supporting the initiative, theClarence House Academy.

The theme, Naples and its beauties, might seem obvious but it isn’t, because the prize will be awarded to whoever manages to tell the secret, intimate, hidden beauty of the city, expressed in all its forms, from art to architecture, from daily life to productive life.

And a single shot won’t be enough to win. It will actually be necessary to tell the revealed city with a project composed of ten images, although to participate, sending one to three will suffice. Because the first prize, innovative of its kind, will be the broadcasting of the entire project on the television circuit present throughout the metropolitan transport network of Naples and its province, for a month and in random mode, meaning two images at a time will be broadcast cyclically for 15 seconds, forty times a day from June 15 to July 15, 2014.

A showcase certainly different from that offered by traditional art galleries and with a potential of about three hundred thousand “observers” per day, which is the number of daily travelers on the Neapolitan public transport service.

The prize is offered byVideometrò News Networkwhich manages the programming installed in the new Neapolitan Underground, popularly known as theMetrò dell’Arteand in the stations of the city’s railway lines, funiculars, Cumana, Circumflegrea, and Circumvesuviana.

There will then be four other prizes offered by as many partners and sponsors: the Leonardo printing house will produce fifty copies of the portfolio for the second-place winner, theTouring Club Italianooffers two illustrated volumes for the third prize, theFineArt Lablaboratory will print a photograph in fine art for the winner chosen by the “people” of Facebook, and finally, theFondo Ambiente Italianowill donate one of its volumes to an author recommended by the jury.