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.
Take a look, I hope you’ll see what I
mean.—David W. Fuller
The Costco Connection JANUARY 2006
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