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Created in 2012, Camera Clara Photo Award is dedicated to photographers using large format camera. It rewards an unpublished work created by an artist, presented as a series or other coherent and comprehensive photographic set. The work will be assessed on its coherence, as a form as well as a content.
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Darek Fortas
Prize winner 2014
Between 2011 and 2013 Darek Fortas made multiple trips to the largest coal mine complex in the European Union located in the Upper Silesia, Poland in order to expand his previous body of work ‘Coal Story’.
Fortas‘ new project, by offering a typological classification of miners’ changing rooms, aims to draw attention to the cultural and socio-political dimension of industrial architecture - with particular emphasis on the history of the communist resistance movement in 1980s that resulted in major socio-political transformation in Central and Eastern Europe after 1989.
Darek Fortas graduated with MA in Fine Art Photography from the Royal College of Art. He has worked with a range of established creative and cultural partners, and his work has been exhibited nationally and internationally (LE BAL, Paris, 2018; Bloomberg New Contemporaries, London, 2018, and Newcastle, 2017; RUA RED, Dublin, 2016; The Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2022; among others).
His socially engaged lens-based practice has been offering a poetic and uncompromised take on the shared history, heritage, power relationships, and current issues we face as a society. Through his work, Fortas accentuates the potential of lens-based form as a mode of deconstruction, the role of images in the distribution of power, and the subversive value of a lens-based mode of enquiry.
In 2014, he was awarded the Camera Clara Prize by The Grésigny Foundation in Paris. Fortas was also shortlisted for the MAC International 2014 Art Prize as a part of the MAC International Biennial. He won the Propeller Fine Art Award 2011 and was shortlisted for The Foam Paul Huf Award (2012) and the BMW Residency Award at Musée Nicéphore Niépce (2018)
His works have been featured in the British Journal of Photography, Irish Arts Review, Source Photographic Review, Uncertain States, and various online photography blogs and magazines.
Fortas’ works are included in a number of public and private collections, including Institut Polonais Paris, Fondation Grésigny and Pierre Passebon Gallery Paris. In 2018, the UK Government Art Collection acquired work from ‘Skene’ project.
He received the Developing Your Creative Practice Award by the Arts Council England.
www.darekfortas.com