All Photos © Prokopis Manousopoulos

Two weeks ago, our WPPI conference and trade show took place in Las Vegas, culminating in a dazzling awards show which celebrated the winners of this year’s 16 x 20 Print, Album and Filmmaking Competition. All week long, we’ve been featuring some of the Grand Award winners’ work here. Today we feature an image by Prokopis Manousopoulos, who captured the Grand in the Album Division: Event/Informal, and shares his approach and concept with us (below is an image from the winning album). See a full list of the winners online and look for the printed gallery in our April issue.

The protagonist of my winning album, “ESCAPE,” is not a fictional character. He is a real person (Vassilis Zacharopoulos) who lives in my hometown of Zacharo, a small town in Southwest Greece. In the past, during his youth, he faced problems with drug addiction. Luckily, he managed to escape them and he keeps living his life carrying his past experiences. Quite often he comes to my office in the morning just to say good morning or, if there is some spare time, to have a little chat. This is how I got the idea to take some pictures that illustrate his condition.

My initial thought was to do this only as a personal project. The need to participate in a competition emerged when I realized how special and different this project was.

This was my very first participation in WPPI’s Print Comp and this is the reason why I felt so happy and surprised when my friend and colleague Nik Pekridis informed me about my success. It is a great honor for a photographer to win a Grand Award in the WPPI competition. I also want to thank Vassilis for allowing me to photograph him for this project.

As for the technical part, for most of the album photos I used a Nikon D4 along with a 35mm f/1.8 lens and a 85 mm f/1.8 lens. In some shots, I used a Fujifilm XT2, with a 10-24mm f/4 lens. — Prokopis Manousopoulos

(Below, more images from the winning album.)