ince handing out its first award in
1955 for a picture of a motorcyclist skidding out of control, the
annual World
Press Photo contest has grown into photojournalism's premier
event. The 50th-anniversary exhibition, featuring prize-winning news
images from 2004, opens tomorrow at the United Nations headquarters
in New York.
This year's Photo of the Year award went to the Indian
photographer Arko Datta for his shot of a woman in Cuddalore, in
southern India, lamenting the death of a relative killed in the
tsunami. World Press Photo, a nonprofit foundation based in
Amsterdam, also handed out prizes to more than 60 other
photographers from two dozen countries. They were chosen from almost
70,000 entries submitted by more than 4,000 photographers, more than
in any previous year.
Though the international jury initially sees each image for a
mere two seconds, it still takes almost two weeks of long days for
the members to select the winners, using game-show-type clickers to
enter their votes anonymously.
The recent uptick in submissions may seem linked to the
proliferation of cameras in more and more devices, like cellphones,
a phenomenon gradually turning everyone into an aspiring shutterbug.
But World Press Photo is open to professionals only, which explains
why some of the biggest news photos of 2004 were conspicuously
absent.
"We had a lot of discussions this year because of the Abu Ghraib
photos and the coffin pictures" of United States soldiers returning
from Iraq, said the Argentine photographer Diego Goldberg, the
chairman of this year's jury. But they were taken by amateurs.
"Journalistically they were very important, extremely important," he
said, "but the organization is called World Press, not 'photography
in general.' It's about what is being produced by professionals for
the press."
Echoing the arguments that news organizations frequently use to
explain how what they do differs from what blogs do, many of this
year's winners played down the threat of amateurs. Nina Berman, a
New York-based photographer who won a prize for a series of pictures
showing the lives of wounded American soldiers home from Iraq
(originally published in Mother Jones magazine), said amateur photo
scoops are an exception. "These took months and months of time," she
said of her photographs, which have been collected in a book called
"Purple Hearts." "The method of working, the level of expertise, of
respect, is just totally different. It's like the third-grade
scribble versus the Ph.D. thesis."
Mr. Datta, who works for Reuters, embraces the changes. "I feel
it's a welcome trend," he said by e-mail. "The line between
professional photojournalists and amateurs is thinning. And with
more and more nonprofessionals opting to use their cameras to
capture socially relevant images, it can only make photojournalism
more popular."
Some winners bemoaned the decreasing number of outlets for
classic reportage photography, which has long been a hallmark of
World Press exhibitions. "There's so few venues for this work
anymore," Ms. Berman said. "Magazines aren't interested so much in
news beyond their demographic. This is a major problem."
Erik Refner, a Danish photographer who won the first of several
World Press awards in 2002 at 31 (after successful stints as a
soldier, athlete and photo model), agrees some markets are drying
up. "I see less and less clients willing to publish these, and to
pay a reasonable price for them," he said. "It's extremely difficult
to sell."
All the more reason for photographers to rise to the challenge,
he said, by more actively pursuing assignments, for example,
"instead of just sitting and waiting for them to call you."
"You need to regroup," he added. "It's a part of the evolution.
Of course the business has changed a lot, but then we just have to
adapt to that."
That adaptation can come in the form of taking better photos. A
trend that Mr. Goldberg noted this year was how "many photographers
went back to shooting medium format," which produces large, lucid
negatives still unrivaled by even the best digital cameras. "There
you see really the difference in quality."
One photographer keen on traditional film is Paolo Woods, a
self-described "digital dinosaur," who won a World Press prize this
year for his idiosyncratic images of Iraq, which he shot on
square-format, black-and-white film. In addition to the quality
differences, Mr. Woods, who is based in Paris, appreciates the pace
of analog shooting. "Photojournalists always look for speed, but I
wanted to be slowed down somehow," he said. "It's a bit like wine:
you make the wine; then you wait a while for it to become good
before you drink it. But digital images, you consume immediately."
Though he occasionally shoots digitally and agrees that digital
quality will surpass even medium-format film in a few years, he says
that seeing each shot on a digicam's L.C.D. screen can lead to lazy
picture-making. "You tend to be satisfied a lot more quickly," he
said, "but when you're shooting with film, you never know what
you've got, and you push on and eventually it's the last image
that's the good one."
Another issue debated at this year's contest was whether the
flood of pictures from camera phones and sites like Flickr.com might contribute
to diminishing the power of the still image. "Those images will not
have the same impact," Mr. Woods said, "and that has created a
desire to see a certain photojournalism of quality, the real
in-depth work. I think in the viewers there is a thirst for good,
quality work."
And though space for contemplative photo essays may be decreasing
in the print media, photography galleries and photo books are
growing in popularity.
"I'm skeptical about the notion of tragedy fatigue or compassion
fatigue," said David Campbell, a geography professor at the
University of Durham, England, who spoke at the awards ceremony in
Amsterdam on April 23, and in a telephone interview, said: "Still
images continue to have a surprising degree of power. You wouldn't
think that people in the age of the Internet and television would
still go out and buy $45 coffee-table books, but they do. It's still
the still image, and not the television footage, that sticks in your
head."
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