Books > The Millenium photo project
In April of 1999 the Millennium Photo Project launched on the internet. The idea was to bring together photographers from around the world to document the arrival of the year 2000.
Photographers in more than a hundred countries, both amateur and professional, submitted thousands of photographs from New Year's Eve. The resulting book Dawn of the 21st Century by The Millennium Photo Project is the offspring of a photographic journey that inspired 3,500 photographers to submit about 269,000 photos taken between noon Dec. 31, 1999, and noon Jan. 1, 2000 (local time around the world)
In February 2000, the photos were judged (two-thirds of the photographers had never had their work published) and narrowed down to the approximately 500 found in this book. Its 320 pages carry the work of 370 photographers from 117 countries.
For more info about the story go to:
http://www.millenniumphoto.com/english/intro.html
Renato Valterza was deeply involved in the project acting as the national coordinator of the project in Italy and as a successful Photographer.
He documented the New Years Eve in his own town,Turin.All the three pictures he entered the project were very successful:
A first one is included in the "Judges Award Winners" list and published on the Web:
http://www.millenniumphoto.com/english/photos/week43.html
A second one is published in the book
A third one is included in the "The Time Capsule Winners" list
As the national coordinator of the project for Italy I am proud that many others Italian photographers have been very successful.
The official winners list:
http://www.millenniumphoto.com/english/winners.html
Some questions to the Photographer:
We would like to get an idea of what it was like to be running around taking pictures at midnight Dec. 31, 1999 where were you? What was going on? What was going through your mind?
For that night my choice was to document what was going on in my town which is Torino (Italy) because you have more opportunities of getting good results working on a well known subject. Like other important assignments the main task was to work very professionally planning in advance the shooting and trying to forecast what kind of problems I could have to face.
Of course there was also the strong emotion for that unique event. I checked in advance which the most significant happenings of that night were: the concert in the main square, the big party for aged people, and the fireworks on the river at midnight.
I started in moving around dic.31 at 5 PM and I stopped after 12 hours in order to document what was going on before and after midnight, for all the night the biggest effort was to be able to maintain the concentration on the job although the emotion, the cold weather, the heavy equipment...
At midnight I couldn't take exactly the pictures that I had carefully planned in advance because of the crowd and the heavy traffic and that was very disappointing. Bay the way after 12 hours working very hard I got about 360 photos and it was a very difficult choice to send only three of them for the Project.
If you like pictures enjoy this unique book which is going to be a piece of history in photography:
