First Place, black and white

After stepping off a subway in Manhattan, Abdolreza Aminlari looked through his camera to see the backlighted image of blurred figures walking by and snapped this year’s first place black-and-white photo. "The camera was set for close-up shots on the subway, so when I got off, these people that were far away were out of focus," he explains. "It was just by chance."

For this photo, Aminlari used a Mamiya RZ67 camera loaded with Kodak Tri-X 400-120 film, which he developed himself. He is currently interning for a photographer in New York, and is a student at the Center for Creative Studies in Detroit. He plans on going to graduate school and would like to get into the fine-arts realm. Aminlari has won medals from Detroit’s Scarab Club and was a finalist in a student issue of Photo Form. He was also recently featured with a group of 12 artists in a New York art show.