Juror's Statement:

Self portraits can be fraught. They can expose something other than what the artist intended. The most successful portraits submitted to Mirror, Mirror I suspect, did just that. They dealt with pregnancy, death, rebirth, violence, fear, heartbreak, loneliness, the supernatural, sexual identity, falling in and out of love, loss of virginity, and ironically, the loss of self. The camera allows a kind of scrutiny that can show one how they feel, whether it be conscious or not

The less effective pictures submitted, tackled some fascinating ideas like wrestling with ones self, being ones own grandfather, and hiding from ones self, but the ideas were stronger than the images.

The weakest pictures were over-produced, over-photo shopped, mixed media, shadows and reflections, snapshots, and jokes that weren’t funny.

In almost all cases I found that the titles of the photographs were too literal. They tried to explain what the artist was suffering which had the deleterious effect of making me, the viewer, feel that the mystery was gone. Good titles are always challenging to find, but without them we aren’t free to have our own interpretations which can be myriad.

Amy Arbus

Juror:Amy Arbus
American contemporary photographer and daughter of Diane Arbus whose career combines commercial work, teaching at ICP and personal projects. She has published five books. Her first book, No Place Like Home (Doubleday & Co, 1986), examined unconventional houses and her second, The Inconvenience of Being Born (Fotofolio, 1999), the emotional reactions of babies. The New Yorker called The Fourth Wall her masterpiece. Her most recent, After Images, is an homage to modernism's most iconic avant-garde paintings.

In the 1980s Arbus took a series of photographs picturing New York street fashion. More than five hundred of the images were published in Village Voice at the time and seventy were later collected in her book On the Street (Welcome, 2006).

Amy Arbus has been photographing professionally for twenty-nine years. Her photographs have appeared in over one hundred periodicals around the world, including The New Yorker, Aperture, ESPN Magazine, and The New York Times Magazine. Her advertising clients include American Express, Nickelodeon, Saatchi & Saatchi, New Line Cinema, Christiano Fissore, and The California Children and Families Commission.

She teaches portraiture at the International Center of Photography, NORDphotography, Anderson Ranch and The Fine Arts Work Center. Amy Arbus is represented by The Schoolhouse Gallery in Massachusetts. She has had twenty-five solo exhibitions worldwide, and her photographs are a part of the collection of The National Theater in Norway, The New York Public Library and The Museum of Modern Art in New York. 

Juror's Statement:

It was interesting and fun to jury a show with such a specific theme. Still I found that I had to narrow down the criteria I used in selecting images. The color blue had to be in there, and while it didn’t necessarily have to predominate, in most cases it did have to stand out and in some way “make” the image. I eliminated many images that had been heavily and obviously filtered or photoshopped, those where the blue was an obvious gimmick, and those that, even mostly blue, could easily have been mostly red, or yellow or some other color. And of course, the image itself had to be strong, so in some cases I chose images that were not necessarily about the blue, but that were powerful, and in which blue was a component.

––Joanna Hurley, July, 2014

Juror: Joanna Hurley

Joanna Hurley has had a thirty-year career in book publishing working as an editor, publicist, agent, packager and publisher for dozens of photography books as well as books on many other subjects for companies large and small. She is president of HurleyMedia, LLC, which she started in 1994. Previously she was publicity director of Vintage Books, the trade paperback division of Alfred A. Knopf, marketing director of The University of New Mexico Press, and publicity director of the Body Politic Theatre/Community Arts Foundation in Chicago. During the course of her long career, she has worked on projects for a wide variety of photographers and writers ranging from Nick Brandt, Mark Klett, Richard Misrach, Irving Penn, and Eliot Porter to Tony Hillerman, Richard Russo, Thomas McGuane and Richard Ford. She is a co-founder of Radius Books, and board chair of Center, a not-for-profit organization based in Santa Fe that supports and provides opportunity for gifted, committed photographers.

Juror's Statement:

Juror: Darren Heath

Darren Heath is a multi award winning photographer based in London England, specialising in Formula One and the automotive industry, endeavouring to cover events and commissions in a creative and artistic manner using natural light and colour to their maximum effect.

Clients include McLaren, Ferrari, Ford, Jaguar, BMW, Toyota, Philip Morris, British American Tobacco, Vodafone, Bridgestone, FIA, Henri Lloyd, Time, F1Racing, Car Graphic, F1 Sokuho, F1 Scene, Car, Top Gear, The Sunday Times, The Telegraph, The Observer, The Financial Times, The Sun, and Conde Nast Traveller.

In 2005 The Royal Photographic Society awarded Darren their prestigious Honorary Fellowship as recognition of his excellence and evidence of distinguished ability in his chosen field.

In addition to his motor sport work he also shoots both commissioned work and more personal photography taken away from the race tracks of the world. Find this work in his ‘off track’ gallery.