Glasgow man bags top photography award

Glasgow’s Jim Dunn has landed first prize in a prestigious global photography competition for his dramatic and emotive exposure of the new Riverside Museum.

Famous photographer Amanda Van has said: ‘Everything around us, ourselves included, is in constant change. Photography is our means of capturing now – and to remember where we’ve come from.’ Jim, an amateur photographer who works for Glasgow Life, put this theory into practice as construction of the new Riverside Museum gathered pace.

Jim said: ‘For the past few years I have been documenting the construction of the building on the old dockyard. Every couple of months I go to the site and photograph the next stage. As you can imagine, I have hundreds of images!’

Out of these hundreds came ‘Elements’. It shows a worker in a cherry picker, against the skeleton of the new building and a threatening, stormy sky.  Jim’s ‘Elements’ was chosen from 1000 entries to scoop the 2010 Chartered Institute of Building’s Art of Building digital photography competition.

Reflecting on his award, Jim said: ‘A colleague of mine alerted me to the Art of Building competition which he noted in a magazine. The image I submitted was taken about a year ago. To win really is something else.’

The judges were swayed by the photograph’s  placement of austere building structure and weather beside the honest endeavour of the working man.  One judge commented: ‘The structure is cathedral-like, the juxtaposition of the storm clouds and building is very powerful, but the construction worker is up there in his cherry picker doing what he needs to do.’

The competition runs annually and is open to amateur and professional photographers. The new £74 million Riverside Museum has been designed by Zaha Hadid architects and is due to open its doors in 2011.

Jim’s award completes a Glasgow double in the photography  stakes. Last month, Glasgow’s Paul Cook won the UK-wide Marwell Wildlife Photographer of the Year award with his ‘Swallows Tale-The Chase.’ A great year for Glasgow photography! As Ezra Pound said:  ‘All great art is born of the metropolis.’