ESTAÇÃO IMAGEM’s competition, a unique award in photojournalism in Portugal, is promoted in partnership with the Mora Town Council and was held in two consecutive years. The competition is open to photojournalists from Portugal, Galicia, and Portuguese-speaking African countries as well as to foreigners residing in these territories.

Our media partners are RTP, Lusa Agency, Público newspaper, and the Angola-based weekly newspaper Expansão.

The competition aims to promote documentary photography-report in a context where this journalistic genre is given less and less salience in national news outlets. The sheer number of participants is a tell-tale sign of the importance of these types of initiatives.

We have had 462 reports submitted by 164 photojournalists, totalling 4,968 images coming out of news reports released in varied outlets throughout the year 2010

The jury of the current edition was headed by Walter Astrada, an Argentinian photojournalist and prize winner of World Press Photo (WPP) over the last three years. The jury, gathered in the town of Mora between the 13th and 15th of April, was also composed by:  Ayperi Karabuda Ecer, vice-president of Pictures at Reuters and who also headed the jury in the first edition; Laura Serani, director of the photography festival of Bamako, ex-manager of FNAC’s photography collection and a jury member of WPP 2010; Marizilda Cruppe, photojournalist of the Brazilian newspaper Globo, one of EVE collective’s founding members and jury member of WPP 2010; finally, Volker Lensch, photography editor-in-chief of the German magazine Stern.

Prize winners were announced at a public ceremony on April 16th in the Alentejo town of Mora, followed by a conference with the winners and jury members who exposed the reasons of their selection.

The competition was divided in six categories: News, Daily Life, Portrait Series, Nature, Arts and Shows, and Sports. The jury chose a main winner for the prize ESTAÇÃO IMAGEM | MORA 2011 from all the contestant reports.

In regards to the work Grant and amongst the candidate projects, the jury’s final selection was Paulo Alegria’s “Cultura Magra” which sets out to document collective-associative life in the Mora region focusing on culture, sports, and entertainment. The work will be published in book format and exhibited at the awards’ ceremony of 2012.

Running in parallel with the awards’ ceremony, we also had the book launch and opening of the exhibition of the 2010 Grant showcasing the work “O PREC já não mora aqui” by João Carvalho Pina.

The proponent works were presented on ESTAÇÃO IMAGEM’s website – a method adopted for the first time in Portugal and which we piloted in the first edition.

A natural outcome of this year’s edition is then the exhibition of all the awarded works. The opening will take place at the Portuguese Centre of Photography in the city of Oporto on June18th. The works will be further exhibited in various locations across the country.