Eyeshot is an independent publishing project for street and documentary photography that was founded in Italy in 2018. They publish books and magazines, host exhibitions and a podcast, and run an annual Open Call. The focus is, ultimately, on serving the photographic community and putting photographic work into print.
This year I submitted a set of images that I’ve made over the past few years to their Open Call. While I also had the option of submitting at least nine images as a body of work for consideration for a book, I don’t think that I’m anywhere close to ready — or have a sufficient body of work — for something like that. Perhaps in another 5–10 years!
On the whole, I think that competitions are helpful for — at a minimum — compelling photographers to review their bodies of work and assess what they’ve created. That practice, alone, is probably more important than successfully winning any given prize. I suspect that most of us have large collections of images but fairly infrequently critically review our work to assess what is ‘good enough’ to submit for jury review. For me, at least, the process raises different kinds of questions than posting daily images to social media or somewhat informally sharing work with others.
The images that I choose to submit this year to Eyeshot’s Open Call are below. All images have previously been showcased on my Glass profile.
All images made using a Leica Q2, iPhone Pro 17, or Ricoh GR iiiX, and lightly edited using Darkroom and/or Apple Photos.
Christopher Parsons an amateur Toronto-based documentary and street photographer, and has been making images for over a decade. His monochromatic photographs focus on little moments that happen on the streets and which record the ebb and flow of urban life over the course of years and decades.
His work often tries to capture the urban landscape from unfamiliar perspectives and routinely focuses on attention to small and transient details of his environments. Rather than pursuing individuals on the streets he focuses on the backdrops of the urban environment and how subjects live their lives passing through them.
His work has been highlighted on Ted Forbes’ YouTube Channel, The Art of Photography, on the Photowalk Show podcast hosted by Neale James, Street Photography Magazine, as well by the Glass social media platform.
Outside of photography, Christopher has worked on high-profile national and international privacy, data security, and national security issues. He is currently employed at a government data privacy and transparency regulator.
