Costco Connection - January 2006

10years of
Costco’s
International
Photo Contest
The sights on
memory lane

WE ALL KNOW journeys begin with a single step. In the case of Costco’s International Photo Contest, we began with 800 photographs. That was the number of entries in our first contest in 1995. The last few years, we’ve been running at more than 20,000 entries from the seven countries in which we operate.

The International Grand Prize Winner in that first contest was Johanna Renshaw, of Rockville, Maryland, for her photo of her brother and 4-year-old niece. There have been more than 500 other winners chosen from more than 139,000 entries in the ensuing 10 years.

So we thought a little walk down memory lane might be in order.

Each winning photograph in the contest is agonizingly chosen by a panel of judges, which over the years has included editorial, graphics and buying staff from Costco, nationally acclaimed photographers, artists’ representatives, color experts and representatives of our sponsors such as Kodak and Qualex. The photos presented in this retrospective have been selected from among the 500 winners by Connection art director Doris Winters (a contest judge from the beginning) and her staff, with my final yea or nay.

Why these particular photos? What are the standards used by the judges and the art director? Every set of guidelines we have devised seems to get tossed out once we have the images in front of us. When all is snapped and done, the eye, professionally practiced or otherwise, always returns to the same top candidates. Is it color, composition, subject? Sometimes it’s all of the above or one or two such considerations. Always the winning image is the one that simply arrests our eye, hits us emotionally, surprises us with its freshness.