By Conor Risch

Polish photographer Rafal Milach has won $25,000 grand prize in the Photography.Book.Now competition for a project on the Black Sea.

The results of the second annual Blurb-sponsored contest were announced Thursday. Milach's project Black Sea of Concrete includes a series of images of the coastline of the Black Sea he created in December 2008 on commission for Belgium-based NGO Altemus. Milach’s book emerged from the “editorial” category of the competition. Photographers also submitted books in “fine art” and “commercial” categories.

The competition’s lead judge, Darius Himes, co-founder of Radius Books, says the competition was not strictly about the quality of the photographs, but also the attention paid to the book as an object.

Milach’s project stood out for its “strong photography, important subject matter, vigorous edit and intelligent sequencing, combined with a thoughtful attention to those elements that are specifically book-centric, including type treatment, page-layout and cover design,” Himes said in a statement.

One specific element of Milach’s book that Himes singled out for praise was the text, which was designed to appear as if it were coming at the reader in waves, a reference to the book’s subject, the Black Sea. Milach collaborated with a designer, Ania Nalecka, on the project.

In an email to PDN, Milach said he hadn’t yet thought about what he would do with the prize money, but projected that some of it would be used to help fund the “several” projects he’s currently working on, including another book.

The judges recognized Joshua Deaner’s I Sell Fish as the fine art category winner. Deaner created the book using a diaristic, collage-style approach, and included family snapshots alongside found imagery and his own photographs. “One of the things the judges mentioned several times was that each of them wanted to come back and spend more time with [I Sell Fish],” Himes told PDN.

British photographer Kurt Tong’s People’s Park, which looks at recreational spaces in China, won in the editorial category. Tong also received second runner-up honors in the category for In Case It Rains In Heaven. Himes noted that a third Tong book was also in the running. “The fact that two of [Tong’s] books were chosen as winners really speaks to the quality of his photographic vision and the strength of the projects themselves,” Himes said. “The judges were really pleased to be able to support him.”

The commercial category presented an interesting challenge, Himes said. The category winner, Dennis Kleiman’s Volume One, and the two runners up were all portfolio-style books, as were a large number of the submissions in the category. Himes said he had tried to convey to photographers that the “commercial” classification referred to the style of the book, not the style of the photography. He cited Jill Greenberg’s top-selling Monkey Portraits as an example of a “commercial” book, which had a subject matter that appealed to a wide audience, not just to photography enthusiasts and collectors.

"There were some books submitted to the fine art category that we felt had a broad commercial appeal, and would have done well in that category," Himes said, "but the judges didn't advance them because they were submitted to the 'fine art' category." Himes said that judges were not allowed to move books from one category to another due to contest rules.

Winners were chosen from a pool of more than 2,400 submissions. The fine art category received the highest number of submissions, while the commercial category received the fewest.

A full list of winners and honorable mentions is available on the Photography.Book.Now Web site.