Gallery of winning photos and photographers' statements

Shane Bauer

A fourth-year student majoring in peace and conflict studies, Shane Bauer’s prize-winning work documents the destruction and human toll in the Darfur, where Sudanese government forces have brutalized the civilian population in response to insurgents demands for distribution of wealth, power-sharing, and development of the region. In summer 2006 Bauer traveled to Darfur to photograph the “on-the-ground reality that the media was scarcely reporting.” With the Sudanese government severely restricting access to foreigners, he flew to neighboring Chad and, from a small village on the border, crossed into the war-torn region with the Sudan Liberation Army rebels. After three years of bombing and burning throughout the countryside, he says, “there is almost nothing left to destroy.”

Jason Karpman

“The Family Romance,” a title taken from Freud’s famous essay, is the prize-winning collection of photos by Jason Karpman, a fourth-year film-studies student. In his essay Freud wrote that breaking free of the authority of one’s parents is among the most necessary, and most painful, stages of human development. “These portraits of my family are an embodiment of my own anxiety about this process of development,” says Karpman. “Growing up is a struggle, a constant fight to hold onto the comfort of the present as it forever becomes the past.”

Chris Buerkle

The graphic styles of commercial signage on Telegraph Avenue in Oakland are the subject of the photos of Chris Buerkle, a fourth-year architecture student. The street, Buerkle says, is undergoing gentrification and new development; by documenting the carefully designed signage — created over many decades — he aimed “to produce an aesthetic driven by geometry and juxtaposition, rather than sentiment.” His images, he says, “are dense with layers of advertising in relation to architecture…[the graphic styles they depict] help create a sense of place and hold great sway over our memory of a place.”

Matthew Gracia

A fourth-year religious-studies student, Matthew Gracia’s honorable mention collection of photos is “The Landscape of the Body: A Study in the Microcosm.” He notes, “So much of what is considered compelling photography today is involved with the ‘exotic other’ — we travel to foreign locales, revealing imagery that displaces us from the everyday. But what about those intimate moments  that we experience daily?...Can we be compelled by imagery so intimate that it reveals the wordless connections of love, or comfort, or family?”

Cindy Park

“If man wishes to express himself photographically, he must understand, surely to a certain extent, his relationship to life,” says Cindy Park, a fourth-year architecture student. Her series of photos of a faceless woman spotlights both the blur and impermanence of the captured moment and the intangibility of identity. “I am interested in relating the problems that affect me to some set of values that I am trying to discover and establish as being my life,” she says. “I want to discover and establish them through photography.”