2022 reFocus Awards – Black & White Photo Contest
Awards & Benefits
Winners of the reFocus Awards enjoy more than prizes; honorees will be actively promoted and celebrated throughout the year and beyond.
PRIZES ARE DESIGNED TO MEET YOUR NEEDS AS A PHOTOGRAPHER, WHEREVER THEY ARE IN THEIR CAREERS.
Global Exposure
Receive international press exposure as well as have your work judged by industry professionals, gallery directors, museum curators, and influential tastemakers
Cash Prizes
$4,000+ in cash prizes
Exhibition:
An artist-forward space dedicated to exhibiting your works online
Winner’s Assets
Custom badges and certificates to seamlessly share your wins with the world and get your work the attention it deserves
Artist Directory
Receive your own personalized page with links to your website and social profiles as a year-round point of discovery for your work
Press Release
Customized press assets to help you share your win using a professionally written and formatted press release
Winner’s Interview
A publicly-shared and promoted interview with links to your work and social profile will help you get the global recognition you deserve
Professional
Non Professional
Judges
Our international panel of judges represents today’s topmost tier of influence and distinction within our photography community.
Judges include world-renowned photographers, curators, directors, and industry professionals who were chosen based on their respected positions within the global photography world.
Contest Categories
Images can be entered into multiple categories and will be judged independently of one another based on the selected category.
We highly encourage you to be expansive in your interpretation and selection of categories for your work.
- Abstract
- Architecture
- Events
- Fashion & Beauty
- Film/Analog
- Landscapes
- Life During a Pandemic
- Minimalism
- Nature
- Nude
- People
- Photojournalism
- Portrait
- Wildlife
Rules
These rules summarize how you may enter the reFocus contest, how your entry will be judged, and expand on some of the awards and benefits you may receive as a winner. In addition, all of our contests are governed by our Terms of Use. When you enter any reFocus contest, you are deemed to have read and accepted these rules and the Terms of Use.
Submission Rules & Requirements
General
We welcome participation by any individual content creator at least eighteen (18) years of age older
Professionals and non-professionals will be judged separately. We define “professional” as those who, at any point in time, have earned income from photography. A “non-professional” includes those who have never, at any point in time, earned income from photography.
While you have the option to save an incomplete submission to finish at your convenience, once you have completed the check out process you can no longer edit your entry.
Entry Eligibility
You can submit your images to as many reFocus contests as you’d like regardless of whether they have previously been awarded or submitted. reFocus also does not require images to be exclusively entered into our contests.
We do not have any restrictions on where your submitted images may have also appeared. Images that are on your website, have been featured in a publication, or have won other awards are welcome.
Eligibility is not dependent upon having created the artwork during a specific time period.
Entry Requirements
Entries must be submitted using the following format. Any images that do not adhere to the following format will not be accepted as submissions.
- Do not watermark or add a logo to your images.
- Image size/ type: Jpegs or PNG files with a minimum dimension of 1500 pixels on the longest edge and less than 5 MB file size.
- If you need to resize your images, you can do so in Adobe Photoshop. However, there are services, such as tinypng.com that are readily available.
- We accept images created on film, digital camera or your mobile phone, in any orientation such as square, portrait, or landscape.You are not required to name your image files in any particular manner prior to uploading.
Sepia photos are acceptable for entry in the Black and White Photo Competition or in any black and white category.
Entry Title & Descriptions
During the entry process, you will have an opportunity to add some brief information about your work such as a title or description. While a title is required for each entry, the description field is optional and you will not be penalized for leaving these fields blank. However, if you feel that text may add value to your image(s) for the sake of the judges, please be sure to add it.
Certain contests accept 2-9 images as a series. Images submitted as a series should all work within a single concept, idea, or framework that binds them together, even if their subject matter or other elements within the images vary.
Text Limitations for All Entries
Title: (maximum 40 characters per image
Description: (maximum 500 characters per image OR 500 characters per series)
No priority is given to either series or single image entries, regardless of the contest.
Judging
Judging is done blindly in a two-step process in which a select number of entries are nominated for awards in each category via a preliminary round.
In subsequent judging rounds, each judge’s rankings are aggregated to determine the category and overall contest winners.
Contacting or lobbying judges is strictly prohibited and may lead to disqualification. Any associated entries belonging to a participant who contacted or lobbied judges will be disqualified.
People’s Vote Award
After judging is completed but before the winners are announced, all entries nominated by the jury will automatically be entered into the People’s Vote Awards where the public will vote on their favorite images within each contest category. The winners of the People’s Vote Award will be based on the number of votes received by the general public relative to the other entries in their respective categories.
The opportunity to win this honor is included at no charge and is in addition to competing for the title in your entry’s category as part of your submission. Winners receive a public profile in our Artist Directory, a featured location in our Winner’s Gallery, and other benefits as outlined in each contest page’s Awards & Benefits Chart.
With tens of thousands of people visiting the reFocus website and People’s Vote Award Gallery during the voting period, this unique honor is one of the many ways we aim to increase the chances of our artists, like you, being discovered and getting well-deserved recognition.
Please note that in order to maintain the most positive experience for all nominated artists, the number of votes each entry receives during the public voting period will not be visible.
Additional information about the People’s Vote Award can be found here.
Awards & Benefits
Press Releases
If you received a custom press release tailored to your achievement as part of your awards package, you will find a link to download it in the “My Awards” tab of your artist portal.
Badges
If your award or honor earned you a digital badge, you can find various versions customized for your personal use available for download in the “My Awards” tab of your artist portal.
Artist Directory
Public profiles are for contest winners and category winners. Other awards and honors may be included in the artist directory depending on the contest. Please refer to the awards and benefits section of each contest to see which honors will have their profiles featured in the artist directory.
Winner’s Certificates
If your award or honor earned you a printed and embossed achievement certificate, it will be sent to you in the months following the announcement of winners at the address submitted during checkout.
If you received a digital certificate, you can download it through the artist portal.
Published Interview
If you received a published interview as part of your achievement, you can expect to be contacted via the email address you used to register in the weeks following the winner’s announcement. If for any reason you did not hear from us but were supposed to receive an interview, please contact hello@refocus-awards.com to make sure we have the correct email address on file.
Premier Artist Placement
If you receive Premier Artist Placement as one of the Awards and Benefits from your win, it means that your work will appear, for a period of time, in highly visible locations on our website such as our main menu, the featured block of our Artist Directory, registration pages, and more.
Cash Prize Distribution
Once contest winners have been announced, our staff will reach out to entrants who have won a cash prize via the email address associated with your artist profile to arrange for payment.
2022 Black & White Photo Contest Cash Prizes will be distributed as follows:
Professional:
1st = $1,500
2nd = $750
3rd = $250
Non-Professional:
1st = $900
2nd = $400
3rd = $200
2023 Color Photo Contest Cash Prizes will be distributed as follows:
Professional:
1st = $1,500
2nd = $750
3rd = $250
Non-Professional:
1st = $900
2nd = $400
3rd = $200
2023 Photo Annual Cash Prizes will be distributed as follows:
Professional:
International Photographer of the Year = $3,500
Non-Professional:
Discovery of the Year = $1,500
Free Entry Award
Free entry will come in the form of Reward Dollars being deposited into your account. This amount will be equivalent to a single-image entry submitted into one category during the early bird period for the next reFocus photo contest.
General
We reserve the right to change any rules and, if this happens, we will contact any entrant affected via email.
If you have any questions that are not covered here, in our Terms of Use, or in out FAQs, please contact hello@refocus-awards.com
