Finding Stillness in Structure: Marc VanDermeer’s “Bird on a Wire” Wins Gold

Marc VanDermeer from United States has been awarded the Gold Award in Black & White & Fine Art Photography – Minimalism at the World Grand Prix Photography Award 2025 Winter Season for his work Bird on a Wire—a photograph that transforms visual excess into quiet clarity through restraint, patience, and decisive reduction.

Captured in 2025 on the older south side of South Norwalk, Connecticut, the image originated from what initially felt like a failed frame. VanDermeer had set out to document a heavy, early-twentieth-century train bridge near the seaport, only to find the resulting photograph overwhelmed by competing girders, cables, and structural noise. Rather than discarding the image, he reframed the moment as an exercise—an opportunity to excavate meaning from visual chaos.

What emerged is a tightly cropped fragment—approximately one-eighth of the original frame—centered on the silhouette of a solitary bird perched atop the industrial structure. Through an extreme crop and deliberate tonal compression, the photograph sheds its documentary weight and moves toward abstraction. Steel beams become bold black bands, wires resolve into graphic diagonals, and the sky turns into a stark field of white negative space. Contrast is pushed until shadows and highlights clip, reducing the scene to its most essential lines and tensions.

At the heart of this stripped-down composition is the bird itself—small, still, and vulnerable. Its presence introduces a human scale into an otherwise monumental setting, creating a quiet emotional counterpoint to the mass and rigidity of the bridge. The title Bird on a Wire encapsulates this balance: fragility resting atop immense strength, life pausing within a system built for relentless motion.

More than a study in minimalism, the photograph becomes a meditation on attention and reinterpretation. It speaks to the value of slowing down, looking closer, and allowing an overlooked detail to carry the weight of an entire narrative. In transforming a visually overcrowded image into one of restraint and resonance, VanDermeer demonstrates how fine art photography can emerge not from perfect conditions, but from the willingness to reimagine what initially appears not to have worked.

With Bird on a Wire, Marc VanDermeer offers a reminder that minimalism is not about absence, but about precision—and that sometimes the most compelling stories live quietly at the edges of a frame.