Curating a gallery full of masterpieces is not the easiest of tasks. You need the mind’s eye of a poet to spot the extraordinary beauty hidden in the ordinary. You need the dispassionate detachment of a monk to avoid being overly enamoured by the famous names behind the famous works. And you need the cold ruthlessness of a butcher to draw a thin red line between the almost-great and the obviously-great.
Guided by these very traits, One Eyeland has been meticulously hand-picking the finest pictures ever shot, week after week and month after month. Having tracked the best images in fashion and fine art, advertising and architecture, portraiture and photo journalism, still life and special effects, and many other categories, we posed ourselves one big question: Is it possible to identify the Best of the Best Photographers for the year?
Even if we could, the key challenge was to find an elegant basis for arriving at the elite list. Should it be a simplistic compilation featuring the masters of the craft most often crowned in OneEyeland.com? Should versatility in style across categories be taken into account? Should depth of skill in one domain be the overriding factor? Or should consistency of brilliance in imagery be the litmus test?
Before we took a call, we asked ourselves, what would the photographers extraordinaire do when confronted with such a dilemma? Henri Cartier-Bresson offered us a clue: “a velvet hand and a hawk’s eye – these we should all have”. Decoded, that’s eloquent effortlessness and exhilarating detailing.
The One Eyeland ‘Best Of The Best Photographers 2013’ is a landmark culmination of all these filters. Chiselled from a raw material of over 85,000 photographs, the Book showcases 108 of the most talented photographers in the world and their 192 adorable works. Go on, feast on the eye candies and raise a toast to the luminous men and women who made it all possible.
