Winners of SAFN’s 2nd Annual Anthropology Day Photo Contest!

David Beriss

We are ready to reveal the winners of this year’s SAFN Anthropology Day photo contest!

The weighty decision was reached by a panel made up of SAFN officers, including Jennifer Jo Thompson, Scott Alves Barton, Joan Gross and me. I want to thank the committee for their work and their patience. Our criteria this year were the same as last year. Photos were judged for

• the ethnographic nature of the pictures, overall.
• the contribution of the photo as insight into foodways.
• the extent to which the photos help us see the work and lives of people in food.
• the overall composition, originality, etc.

In addition, to win, entrants need to be current members of SAFN. Just to be ready to participate next year, consider joining by clicking here.

We had many excellent submissions this year. We are both grateful to those who submitted and very impressed by the photographic eyes of food anthropologists. SVA, watch out!

The overall winner of the 2022 SAFN Anthropology Day Photo Contest is B. Lynne Milgram, of OCAD University in Toronto, Canada. The judges were impressed by the balance in the photos, and the textured invocation of life in the market. In addition to appearing here, some of these photographs appear in

Milgram, B. Lynne and Lorelei C. Mendoza. 2021. Repositioning the Edge: The Resilience of a Wholesale Vegetable Market in Benguet, Northern Philippines. In Norms and Illegality: Intimate Ethnographies and Politics. Cristiana Panella and Walter E. Little, eds., 137-159. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. 

Second place goes to Andrea Sanchez-Castaneda, a Ph.D. Candidate at the Global and Sociocultural Studies Department–Anthropology track, at Florida International University. The photos were remarkable for their lush colors, but also for the way they illustrated the interactions between people and gardens.

Andrea provides an overall comment for the photos below:

The pictures I submit for the contest are part of my dissertation fieldwork research with the urban Muisca indigenous community of Suba, in Bogota, Colombia. These three pictures show the relationship between a group of indigenous women in the city and their gardens. These gardens have served as vital places of territorial resistance, food sovereignty, gender empowerment, and cultural revitalization. In the Muisca community, urban gardens belong to women that have either inherited land from their families or reclaimed land through occupation. These women have challenged the ongoing colonial race violence by enduring relationships with the land and their ancestors through the everyday care of their gardens. 

Bethe Hagens, of Walden University, comes in third, with this remarkable and somewhat mind bending image of eggs cooking on a solar oven.

Finally, we had a runner-up this year whose photos deserve honorable mention. Inayat Ali, Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Fatima Jinnah Women University, Rawalpindi, Pakistan, and a Research Fellow in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna, submitted these photos from his ethnographic fieldwork in Pakistan in 2014, and 2021. His work can be found here: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1659-8492

I want to thank everyone for participating in this year’s competition. I would encourage the winners and, frankly, even participants who we have not mentioned here, to consider writing for the blog, perhaps in a way that further explains what is in your pictures. And we will hopefully do this again next year! Celebrate anthropology!