How will the Photomarathon be judged?

The fun doesn’t finish with the last click of the shutter. Seeing your images printed alongside everyone else’s, winning awards, and disagreeing with the judges’ choices are all part of the experience.  But how will the event be judged? Read on and we’ll explain.

Spare a thought for our volunteer judges. Once you and 99 other photographers have submitted your twelve images to your own gallery, they have the task of sifting through 1,200 images to pick the cream of the crop. But what are they looking for, and how will this process be made manageable?

The first stage is “Sifting”. A team of about 6 individuals (or small groups working together) will look at every gallery. They’ll look for the images that stand out to them, the ones that really nail the topic, the ones that are original in their interpretation, the ones that a technically clever, that show humour, the ones that are a delight to look at. Those images will be marked for the short-list. The sifters will also look at the gallery as an entity – the winning gallery may have many short-listed images, but it may have only a few, but work beautifully as a collection of images, with a consistency of style, or by telling a story. So they recommend galleries for the short-list too.

Given the list of shortlisted images, we’ll then arrange them in 12 new galleries, one per topic, and our independent Awards Panel will decide the winner and runners up in each topic. The Awards Panel will be made up of three or four local photographers and artists, who will approach their decisions with their own eye, but mindful of the Photomarathon golden rule: the image must address the topic.

The Awards Panel will also select the winning gallery (ie the overall winner), runner up galleries, the best gallery by a junior photographer, and the Best Image of Oxford or Oxfordshire.

We’ll then get everything printed up, with A0 sheets with maybe 8 galleries per page for the exhibitions, a sheet per topic showing the winners and runners up, and printed and framed copies of the winning entries as prizes. All ready for the award ceremony in the Autumn.

If you can’t get to the Awards ceremony, don’t worry. The sheets will be on display at various exhibitions during 2027 in Oxfordshire Arts Week and the PhotoOxford Festival.