When we decided earlier this year to hold T&TI’s first ever photo competition, we certainly didn’t expect to recieve the overwhelming response we’ve had! The entries have literally flown in.
It has to be said, confidence wasn’t too high a week before the deadline. In fact, at that time we only had a winner and a runner up! But in true engineer’s style, with the absolute final deadline looming, the email floodgates opened (and crashed my computer whilst going to press on last month’s issue!).
It’s been great to see such diversity in the photographic content submitted – from action shots, to breakthroughs, to some quite stunning architectural compositions.
To say it’s been tough, whittling the entries down to just 10 finalists, is a massive understatement. Picking the winner, featured on both the cover and p28, has been a massive challenge and created quite some conflict here in the office!
But this just reflects the sheer quality of the entries, so we have to say a big ‘thank you’ to all who took the time and effort to enter, and also ‘sorry’ to all those great entries that didn’t make it through.
We decided to hold the competition after it dawned on us, whilst flicking through the recently published book “The City Beneath Us – Building the New York Subways”, that real history is often made during the construction of many tunnelling projects. The Channel Tunnel, for example, is up there with the Hoover Dam when talking construction achievements.
However, the process of realising these achievements are sadly witnessed by so few. For example, one entry in this year’s competition is from the construction of London Bridge Station during the Jubilee Line Extension in the late 1990s. I regularly walk through those connecting tunnels now, and its great to see a photograph of what that exact area looked like, nearly 10 years ago, while it was being constructed.
Something else that has really struck home during the judging of this competition, is a good photographer’s capacity to not only to document construction processes, but also to capture the essence of a moment in time, which can never be repeated (be it the jubilance of a tunnelling crew at the end of a long arduous drive, a stunning play of light on a cavern floor, or simply two co-workers having a laugh together).
We will definitely be holding this competition again next year and I have a feeling it will be an entirely much bigger affair. So the message is, get your cameras out and get creative!
Tris Thomas
