I’m excited to announce the Conscientious Portfolio Competition 2011, the third of its kind. As before, the winner(s) will have their work featured here on this website, in the form of an extended conversation/interview. Two guest judges, Caroline von Courten (Foam Magazine) and Michael Mazzeo (Michael Mazzeo Gallery), are joining me to pick the winner(s) - and there’s a twist. Find all the details below. I will introduce Caroline and Michael in more detail in a separate post. (more)

As before, the Conscientious Portfolio Competition (CPC) is free. It’s no pay-to-play scheme. There are no costs involved for you, other than the time it takes to send in your work.

What is more, CPC is aimed at emerging photographers. Of course, the term “emerging” is not extremely well defined; it means that photographers not represented by a gallery will get preferential treatment over those that already are (but of course, the quality of the work also plays an important role).

Last but not least, CPC happens in two stages. The first stage - where we are now - is the submission stage. Photographers are asked to send in their application via email in the following form:
name
email address
website URL (no Flickr, no blogs)
name of the portfolio/body of work
Any additional information contained in the email will be ignored! Please do not submit images directly.

If you need a statement for your work, it should be on the website. Your website should have a bio/CV, of course. If you don’t have a website you will not be able to enter the competition. This might strike you as unfair, but every serious photographer should have her/his own website, because it shows that s/he is serious about what s/he does.

The portfolio can be either a project or a collection of images; but all the images for consideration have to be in a single place on your website (so “three images from project A and four images from project B” won’t work). One submission per person.

Email the information to: review at jmcolberg.com (you’ll have to replace the “at” with @ and remove the spaces for this to work, of course), subject line “CPC 2011.”

The deadline is 21 August 2011, 11:59pm ET. No exceptions.

From the pool of submissions, 25 candidates will be picked for the second round. The photographers in this pool will receive an email, and they will have to send in ten jpeg images, in a uniform format (size etc.).

This is where Caroline and Michael will come in. They will each pick their personal favourite from the pool of 25. I will pick one, too. Here’s the twist: There will be three or two winners, or maybe just one, if a photographer is picked more than once.

Having a second round is based on the idea of making everything as equal as possible. With uniform file sizes, fancy websites won’t be able to beat out simple ones. With a special naming convention for the jpegs (which will hide the full names), the winner will be solely chosen based on the quality of the work and nothing else.

Note: Your jpegs will not be used for anything but the judging (so there’ll be no Facebook-style re-use of your work!).

As I wrote above, the winner(s) of the competition will have their work featured on this website, in the form of an extended conversation (this will be done via email).

Good luck!

(image kindly provided by CPC 2010 winner Lydia McCarthy, her work is currently on view at Daniel Cooney Fine Art)