Photowalk contest winners

The local winners of the global particle physics Photowalk have been announced by the five participating laboratories. At CERN, Diego Giol and Christian Stephani were the jury’s favourites, and their photos will now go forward to the global vote, competing against the local winners from DESY in Germany, Fermilab in the US, KEK in Japan and TRIUMF in Canada. Two prizes are to be awarded, one selected by a global jury, the other by popular vote – it’s time to get voting!

 


Diego Giol #1
The global winners of the Photowalk contest will be revealed by the second week of October, but the local CERN winners were announced last week. After three weeks of work, two meetings of the jury and three successive selections, 20 photos were chosen from the 792 entries. The three highest-ranked will participate in the final competition. The public can vote for their favourite photos on the interactions.org website until 8 October.

Only two photographers took the three winning photos at CERN: Argentinian Diego Giol, who contributed twice, and Swiss Christian Stephani. Giol, a software engineer, moved to Switzerland a few years ago, and currently works as a project manager at ISO in Geneva. He has been especially passionate about technology and, of course, photography since a young age. Stephani, born in Biel, is currently a student at Biel School of Visual Arts, and has been interested in the arts and photography since 2002.


Christian Stefani

The CERN jury was composed of five members: a professional photographer, the CERN photographer, a computer scientist, a representative of the CERN Library, and a member of the Physics Department.

“The theme of the CERN contest was ‘a different view of CERN’, so, when selecting the photos, we gave preference to those with a novelty aspect”, says Maximilien Brice, CERN photographer and a member of the jury. “The selection was hard, though, as the level was quite high despite it being an amateur contest. I was really impressed by the quality of the photographs as well as by the equipment used by the contestants.” “Beside the technical aspect, the selection took into account also the human and emotional sides since an important quality of a photo is the telling of a story”, adds Michael Doser, SME group leader and the Physics Department's representative on the jury.


Diego Giol #2
The twenty finalist entries of the CERN contest will be exhibited at the Globe next year. A gallery of all the photos taken at the five laboratories is available on Photowalk’s flickr website.

For futher information, see the Bulletin's previous article :  Beauty is in the eye of the photographer.

by Roberto Cantoni