The Giant Camera Obscura at Lands End

• Prize
  Silver in Nature/Other
• Photographer
  Tom Zimberoff, United States
• Date of Photograph
  2023 - 2025
• Website
  https://www.zimberoff.com

Having focused primarily on portraits, I rarely pointed my lens at a landscape, even more seldom at the sea. With a fresh eye—the upshot of a 20-year hiatus from photography—and now living near San Francisco’s Land’s End, I’ve discovered a rhythmic confluence of color and time that pulls me in like a riptide. The liminal interface of seawater, sand, and sky is as evanescent as it is powerful and can only be depicted by a camera adjusted to thwart its mechanical intent to stop time. It’s here that the Giant Camera Obscura is poised over the Pacific, offering the curious a walk-in panorama.

Zimberoff is an American photographer shaped by the last great era of print magazines and a renewed contemporary practice. Classically trained as a musician, he pivoted from clarinet to camera and, with the Sygma Photo Agency, covered hundreds of historical and breaking news stories worldwide. After a long hiatus, he returned to photography with a sharpened focus on portraiture and cultural memory. His career archive is housed at the Briscoe Center for American History at UT Austin. AHis prints are included in a number of museums and private colections. He lives and works in San Francisco.

Awards a bunch