Gallery of winning photos and photographers' statements

Aaron Taylor Lui
Geography

A graduating senior in geography, Aaron Lui grew up in Granite Bay, outside Sacramento. His prize-winning entry was a series of panoramic views of downtown Berkeley, "an expansive way" of seeing "a unique and special place." The personality of the downtown area, he says, "is created from the diversity of its pedestrians and one-of-a-kind landscape of storefront shops and mixed architecture," both modern and historic. The panoramic views of Berkeley's urban center show a broader, more complete composite scene of an area, "grounding the subject to its landscape more effectively," he adds. The curved lines of some of the images, created during the process of stitching together multiple images to form the panoramas, give the photos their special signature.

Jordan Joel Pennock
Environmental Sciences

Jordan Pennock — who won second place in the 2006 Lyon Prize competition — is a third-year student majoring in Conservation and Resource Studies in the College of Natural Resources. He grew up in Albion, Calif., a small coastal town in Mendocino County. Always interested in artistic expression, he has coupled it with a "passion for the environment and social justice." His 2008 Lyon Prize project is "History and Future: A Fading Culture?" — images that resulted from a two-month journey in Tanzania and 10 days with the Maasai in the north, near the base of Kilimanjaro. He made the trip "to witness current power struggles that create pressure, both directly and indirectly, to 'modernize,' these once largely nomadic people."

Konstantin Tomashevsky
Engineering Mathematics and Statistics

A major in engineering mathematics and statistics major, planning to graduate in 2009, Konstantin Tomashevsky focused on an abandoned Oakland 16th Street railway station for his Lyon Prize entry, titled "Train to Nowhere." Of the station, closed after it sustained damage in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, he says, "Ever since a friend brought me here, I have found myself drawn back to this place where the concrete fades into the collective unconscious….My goal with this project was to capture [the] perception of entropy in action on a massive scale."  Each image in his entry is a digital composite of two to eight analog photographs taken at night using long exposures, "a method I employed to transmit a sublime sense of space and hint at the fragmentary nature of memory," he says. Tomashevsky grew up in nearby San Francisco and Berkeley.