Glorious shapes, patterns and textures in the 2019 Minimalist Photography Awards

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Honorable mention, Landscape. The Whale’s Mouth Cloud, the cloud that appears when the first gust front of a storm is passing over, photo captured while on a storm chasing trip in South Dakota, US. (Credit: Fredrick Muscat).

The art of minimalist photography involves stripping an image back to just a few key compositional elements – be it a color, shape or texture. The images celebrated in this year’s Minimalist Photography Awards highlight how beautiful, and compelling, this deceptively simple aesthetic can be, across an impressively broad variety of categories.

The competition spans 12 categories, from conventional targets such as Architecture and Landscape, to the more experimental, including Abstract, Fine Art, and Conceptual. There is no clear definition to explain what constitutes a “minimalistic” photograph in the competition’s entry requirements, but looking at this year’s winners and honorable mentions it becomes quickly apparent what caught the eye of the expert judging panel.

Honorable Mention, Fine Art. House in White, Zeeuws-Vlaanderen, part of the Netherlands

Explorations of geometric shapes, simple color contrasts, or abstract images, seem to make up the majority of the highlighted winners this year. The overall Photographer of the Year prize went to Klaus Lenzen, for a series of images entitled Pole Vault. While Lenzen’s series is inarguably minimalistic, it perhaps isn’t the most compelling set of images to come out of the 2019 competition.

Digging deeper into the large trove of celebrated photographs reveals a truly incredible variety of images, from long-exposures of a full moon to extraordinary patterns in Iran’s desert sands. Maja Strgar Kurecic’s Other Worlds microscopic series envisions an entire universe of psychedelic galactic patterns, Eli Matityahu examines Zaha Hadid architecture with long-exposure abstractions, and Alfonso Calero finds glorious color in Tokyo at night.