Winner: Robin de Puy
Robin de Puy has been selected as the winner of the Rabo Photographic Portrait Prize 2019 with a portrait of writer/poet Remco Campert (1929). “The portrait celebrates life and the work of the writer/poet – it is a true tribute to Campert.” (From the jury report)
The jury, chaired by Wim van Sinderen (curator of the Fotomuseum Den Haag) compiled a long list of fifty-five portraits from nearly three hundred portraits. Five portraits were placed on the shortlist. The winner receives a cash prize of € 10,000, was announced on Wednesday, November 27, 2019.
Robin de Puy made a series of portraits of the Dutch poet and writer Remco Campert (1929) for Volkskrant Magazine. Campert was interviewed just before he turned 90. “Poetry keeps coming back, that’s the most important thing for me. Although I still really want to write a novel. But I am 90 years old, not everything succeeds [smiles] … I continue to fail to give up writing.”
Robin de Puy (NL, 1986) graduated from the Rotterdam Photo Academy in 2009 and won the Photo Academy Award in that year. In 2013 she won the Dutch Portrait Prize for her portrait of fellow photographer An-Sofie Kesteleyn. In 2015, she embarked on a 10,000-km photography road trip through the US on a Harley Davidson. The work that was a result of this trip was exhibited at the Fotomuseum in The Hague and published in If This Is True, I’ll Never Never Home Again (2016). Her work has previously been exhibited in the Breda Museum, Bonnefanten Museum Maastricht and FotoFestival Naarden 2019.
Winner Rabo Photographic Portrait Talent 2019: Annabel van Royen
The winner of the Rabo Photographic Portrait Talent 2019 is Annabel van Royen with the series “(Self) Portrait of a young girl”. “A series with a strong conceptual starting point, personally and literally on the skin of the models and the photographer.” (From the jury report)
For the second time this year there is a prize for photography talent. Talent means: photography students or graduates and self-taught students who have been active as a professional photographer for less than five years.
(Self) Portrait as a young gril © Annabel van Royen, 2019
Annabel van Royen (1993) is a multimedia artist and photographer based in Amsterdam. She graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy of Photography and Visual Arts in 2019. She participated in various group exhibitions and won the “European Photography Award” in 2018.
The series consists of photographs of girls between the ages of 12 and 15 who wear the clothing that the artist from that period kept in her childhood. I went through a difficult period at that age, with many difficult changes in my environment (at home) and in myself. The series is a recreation of a self-portrait when I was young, and a portrait of young girls in general, showing how strong and – at the same time – vulnerable they can be.