A JERSEY photographer has won a prestigious award in an international competition for black-and-white images.
Gina Socrates took first place in this year’s Black and White Spider Awards’ category for silhouettes with her image London Streets, just the latest in a series of accolades Mrs Socrates has collected for her work.
It is an achievement that is all the more remarkable because the associate of the Royal Photographic Society came to photography comparatively late, having qualified in fashion design in London before coming to the Island.
Her description of how she took up the art form is disarmingly simple.
“I normally say that photography found me – it came to me, basically. In 2006 I got my first camera. A friend of mine had bought her first digital camera in London and she phoned me up to tell me how wonderful it was. She said you have to have one; I said I don’t want one,” she said. Of course, the conversation did not end there, her friend being a persistent one and the instruction being repeated until Mrs Socrates’ resolve deserted her: she bought the camera.
Never having used a computer before, it was her son who showed her how to download the images from it, and she simply got on with taking photographs. It was months later that she took advantage of an offer to have some of her work printed when she was advised that, although she had a good eye, the quality of the images was lacking because of the camera.
Since Christmas was approaching, she was persuaded to invest in a new one and that led to a further piece of good fortune when she dropped in to the Jersey Arts Centre one day for coffee. Reading its programme of events, she discovered that they were running a photographic workshop for which she signed up on the spot.
At that workshop her photographs captured the attention of tutor John Nasey, who persuaded her to join the Jersey Photographic Society and since then recognition has come from a variety of organisations and competitions from the Royal Photographic Society to the London Salon of Photography.
Originally, drawn to abstract work, Mrs Socrates explained that she loved everything about photography and wished she could devote more time to it. Her current work explores street photography, an approach that privileges chance encounters and random incidents in public places over the consciously organised.
She recalled leaving her car in a St Helier car park and having to return to put an extra hour’s parking card up because she had become fascinated by the way light was falling in an entirely familiar street. It had been transformed into something that she simply had to capture with her camera. She said: “Often, I interpret my subjects in a way that renders them almost abstract by focusing on details and minutiae which may otherwise pass unnoticed.
“The results are images that become visual riddles which entice the viewer to explore and interpret them, while at the same time maintaining an aesthetic quality which can be appreciated in its own right,” she said.
