The Potato Photographer of the Year 2020 Award has been awarded to photographer Ray Spence for his imaginative image of a potato getting a haircut.
Spence’s image ‘End of Lockdown’ has earned him more than £1000 in prizes, including a Fujifilm X-A7, a year’s membership to the Royal Photographic Society, a one to one workshop with photographer and competition organiser Benedict Brain and three years of Photocrowd master-level subscription.
Judge Nigel Atherton says: “This picture manages to introduce a topical lockdown obsession to the brief of photographing a potato. It takes a great imagination to see a sprouting potato as a head covered with hair, and there is a lot of humour in the way the picture has been executed.”
“We didn’t quite raise a million bucks I had secretly hoped for,” says Brain, “but the few grand we did raise will go a long way to help provide much-needed food for the Trussell Trust. And there seems to be a healthy interest in running another competition next year.”
The competition was inspired in part by the photo of a potato (Potato #345 (2010)), taken by acclaimed photographer Kevin Abosch that sold for $1million in 2016.