My Perspective: Down's Syndrome Photography Prize, Strand Gallery

“There is a tradition of photographing people with Down’s syndrome, but not of positive, strong images of people staring back at you, challenging you to look at them. This exhibition reverses that. The images we produce are not sympathetic or sentimental, but strong and covering all aspects of life, and using contemporary photography to get our message across. We’ve turned the camera 180 degrees and now the former subjects are in control.”

Xanthe Breen, Campaigns Officer for the Down’s Syndrome Association, was talking to me amongst excited exhibitors and their families at the launch of My Perspective. A momentous occasion, it marks the first exhibition of winning photographers – children and adults - with Down’s syndrome.

Ten judges including photographer Scarlet Page, owner of the loaned gallery, Alex Proud, and the actor Emma Barton, studied 350 entries and chose the 10 winners on show. Their works quash any preconceptions I could have had about quality or standards; in fact, several rank alongside the student and amateur portfolios I view. (See Charlie French's Angel Sculpture, Third Prize winner, above)

My Perspective is linked to the six-year campaign Shifting Perspectives which features work by professional photographers with family connections to children with Down’s syndrome, their subjects. The curator is commercial photographer Richard Bailey who launched it with an exhibition featuring portraits of 365 such children. Last year’s group exhibition included photographs by and of several adults with Downs syndrome and the plan was hatched for My Perspectives to open up to a wider community and allow former subjects to show their perspectives on the world.

Bailey’s 11-year-old daughter, Billie-Jo, won a Highly Commended award for her photograph of a blue plastic robot doll standing in the middle of a road and photographed close-up to distort the scale. It reminds me of one of William Egglestone’s still lifes of everyday objects in ordinary settings. Bailey insisted that nepotism wasn’t involved in her selection and Breen explained that “the photographs were all anonymous and numbered; we judged on what we saw”. The result was seven Highly Commended winners, and three prizewinners who each received an Olympus SP-80-0UZ digital camera.

The evening’s official photographer, Vinay Kapoor, a nattily dressed young man with a goatee beard, has a winning exhibit of an Indian wedding. His work has appeared in Shifting Perspectives and he now works as fundraising assistant for the Down’s Syndrome Association’s events department. Breen remembers his awkwardness at the beginning but now, she says, “He’s very confident; he directs you.”

My Perspective First Prize went to Sun by 12-year-old Rory Davies from Cornwall (see main picture). He couldn’t make the award ceremony at Kew Gardens but wrote a letter explaining his passion for photography: “I like taking photographs because I love my family and my dog Bruno. I like looking at the view through the camera. I like using the camera, I like the way it works like a machine for your eye. My photographs make me feel happy.”

Sun is awash with rich autumnal colours and beautifully composed around the focal orb, a result requiring great patience of the boy to capture that precise position. It was taken during a holiday with his mother, but “without assistance from her”, his father said. “It was his plan and she got up with him, very early that morning.” Rory nodded. Having stopped photographing fellow exhibitors, he was now outside, clutching his new camera and firing shots like a motor-drive, of my face, my ring, Jonathan, the pavement. As top winner, he also gets a place in next year’s touring exhibition of Shifting Perspectives in New York, Istanbul, Hong Kong, and York.

His second exhibited photograph is more dramatic and shares with Sun a blood-orange sky. It is set in a bleak, misty field whose foreground is littered with fallen wooden posts and bent wire. What makes the photograph so edgily successful is the diagonal of barbed wire bisecting the scene and suggesting a post-WWI landscape. Rory calls it Wire hurt yourself.

One of the most consistently sophisticated photographers in the collection is Christopher Diedo, (see photograph left) a well-known Kentish character who has exhibited at the Mick Jagger Centre in Dartford. His range spans black-and-white and colour, for documentary scenes, portraits and abstracts. They also reveal an exceptional sense of design. He shares a love of colour with many others with Down’s syndrome, but his black-and-white close-up of an old neighbour’s face reveals an empathy not always achieved by professional photographers.

An obvious question is how involved are the proud parents and friends in the production of these images? Xanthe Breen thinks very few are, because “the photographer also has to write a biography of the pictures, so we can tell what is theirs”. Digital cameras are a technical godsend but, Breen adds, no photographs are digitally enhanced. As photography students are assisted and advised by friends and staff, I can see no problem with a bit of parental aid. After all, it’s the eye that counts.

It could have been easy to be sentimental about this exhibition, but there was never a moment when I felt it – or when I rolled my eyes at poor quality. The show at the Strand Gallery (formerly Proud Central) sadly closes this Saturday, so if you’re strolling through central London, drop in and judge for yourself.

• View all 10 winning photographers on the Down's Syndrome Association website