100 photographers traveled from 23 U.S. states and 13 countries, including Austria, Egypt, Hungary, Japan, Mexico and Scotland, to attend Review Santa Fe, a juried portfolio review event for gifted and committed photographers. This year’s 2011 Review Santa Fe Selection Committee, appointed by CENTER’s Executive Director, Laura Pressley, included: Karen Irvine, Curator and Manager of Publications, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Alan Rapp, Alan Rapp Studio, formerly Senior Editor, Chronicle Books; and Whitney Johnson, Director of Photography, The New Yorker Magazine. Each of the 100 photographers created a significant project or series to present to top publishers, editors, curators, gallerists and photography consultants, for discussion and review.

Tamas Dezso, CENTER 2011 Project Award Winner

The Santa Fe New Mexico Museum of Art’s exhibition, The Curve: CENTER Award Winners 2011, showcase’s Hungarian photographer, Tamas Dezso, whose series was chosen as First Place in the Project Competition by CENTER’s hand-picked international panel of esteemed jurors – Simon Baker of the Tate Modern, Alexa Becker of Kehrer Verlag Publishers and Christina Cahill of Getty Images Reportage. Dezso’s photographs have been published in TIME, The New York Times, National Geographic, GEO, Le Monde Magazine and many others. In his series, Here, Anywhere, Tamas Dezso gives us a first-hand look into post-Communist Hungary.

In a statement by Tamas Dezso about his work, he writes,“The map of Hungary is speckled with capsules of time. During the political transformation twenty years ago, as the country experienced change it simply forgot about certain places – streets, blocks of flats, vacant sites and whole districts became self-defined enclosures, where today a certain out-dated, awkward, longed-to-be-forgotten Eastern Europeanness still lingers. There are places which seem to be at one with other parts of the city in a single space, but their co-existence in time is only apparent; places which decompose in accordance with their own specific chronology, determined by their past, such that what remains would then either be silently re-conquered by nature or enveloped by the lifestyles of tomorrow’s generations. Of the inhabitants, who have never fully integrated with majority society, soon only traces will remain, until they too, disappear in the course of time,”

The Curve: New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM, through August 7, 2011.

Elizabeth Avedon