National Theatre of Scotland

UNSTAGED - A GLOBAL PHOTOGRAPHY COMPETITION

22/01/10

The National Theatre of Scotland has joined forces with Channel 4, Scottish Screen and BAFTA award winning website Blipfoto to create a year-long photography competition.

Each organisation shares the common goals of nurturing creativity, artistic innovation, spontaneity and participation. The aim of the competition is to celebrate and share extraordinary moments and stories from everyday life, through this unique online community.

Blipfoto is a daily photo blogging community and Scottish digital success story. Blipfoto members post one photo a day to the site and invite response from their fellow community of “blippers”. Blipfoto currently holds over 350,000 images and has logged over 2,199,367 comments and they deliver millions of page views per month to over 40,000 visitors. Blipfoto won the 2009 BAFTA Scotland Award for Best Website.

THE COMPETITION
Unstaged is a global photographic event comprised of three consecutive competitions, each emphasising aspects of the extraordinary in daily life. Between each competition start and end date, entrants produce a collection of 5 theme-related photographs with accompanying text. Photographs are uploaded, within the competition dates, through Blipfoto’s daily photo journal platform.

There will be three different competitions throughout the year, running from November 2009 to September 2010. The first competition, Unstaged: Scotland at Play, will run from November 2009 through to February 2010. Full details of the subsequent two competitions will be announced in early and mid 2010.

Nominations and final judging will be based on the entrant’s collection as a whole; where the underlying concept is as important as the technical execution, where image aesthetics are balanced by narrative text. Unstaged is truly open to all — a winning entry is just as likely to come from a camera phone as an expensive digital camera.

THE THREE COMPETITIONS ARE:
Scotland At Play [Winter 2009/10] invites submissions that capture the spirit of performance and play in Scotland. The only competition with a geographic limitation, photos must be taken in Scotland to be eligible.

Forever Young [Spring 2010] invites submissions that convey the feeling of youthfulness and vibrancy. This is an open, international, competition allowing broad examination of a timeless theme.

The Theatre of Everyday Life [Summer 2010] invites creative interpretation of what theatre means beyond the spotlight. Truly Unstaged, it challenges participants to find the dramatic, bizarre, and wonderful narrative in everyday life.