World Press Photo winners announced

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NikonWeb
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World Press Photo winners announced

Post by NikonWeb »

The international jury of the 53rd annual World Press Photo Contest has selected a photo by the Italian photographer Pietro Masturzo as the World Press Photo of the Year 2009. The picture depicts women shouting in protest from a rooftop in Tehran on 24 June.

Image

Personally, I can't understand why this is considered the best press photo in 2009. Strange. Anyone else?

Jarle
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Re: World Press Photo winners announced

Post by Stan Disbrow »

Hi,

Well, considering the status of (a) women and (b) saying anything at all there, this is pretty much way out there.

I guess that's what they were thinking.

Personally, I vote for any photo featuring a solider, policemen, firefighter, medic and the like saving a child from some terrible fate. But, then, I spent a lot of years volunteering my free time to do just that, so such photos never fail to move me.

Later!

Stan
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Re: World Press Photo winners announced

Post by Ashley_Pomeroy »

Odd choice. This is one of those photographs that doesn't mean a thing unless you know the context behind it. And even if you do know the context it's just not very striking. The photo doesn't make me wonder about the people in it, and I don't feel anything. I'm sure it was extremely hard to get the photographer there, get the shot, get the shot back to base etc, but it doesn't do anything for me.

A while back I wrote up a blog post about Kodachrome, and went back over the older World Press Photo winners - the archive's here:
http://www.archive.worldpressphoto.org/

I was trying to find famous old photographs taken with Kodachrome. The 1979 winner was shot with that film but it seems that it wasn't used extensively by "war junkies", I assume because it was relatively slow and hard to process. And colour film was stuffed into its own subcategory for many years.

I understand that most news photographs benefit from knowing the story behind the picture, but the true greats are striking even if you have no clue what's going on. I remember seeing Eddie Adams' famous photo of the Viet Cong execution when I was a kid, and Vietnam to me was just a country in South America, but it made me think. "Has that man really just been shot? Can I see his brains? Why is that man shooting the other man? Why is the solder running towards the camera? What went wrong?"

"What went wrong?" seems to be a theme running through the archive. The more I look at it the more it disturbs me. Not so much because the photographs generally show moments of extreme suffering, but because I'm judging them as pretty pictures rather than recordings of real people actually dying in front of the cameraman.

Looking at the thumbnails, the three that grab me first are all faces. There's the Hutu man with what I assumed to be face makeup but is in fact a pattern of horrible scars; the Albanian man with the bandage; the Nigerien lady with the tiny hand. I had to look up "Nigerien". That's a person from Niger.

Part of me wonders if the photographers were "box ticking" in order to win a World Press Photo award. There are so many little hands and feet; mothers with babies; crying mothers with babies; crying mothers with dead babies. Dead and dying women and children must be like gold dust to a war junkie photographer. I can imagine the photographers ranking their subjects out of ten, with a crowd of people reacting to the dead body of a mother clutching the corpse of a dead baby ranking near the top, and a man who has had his foot blown off by a landmine very near the bottom. The former picture tells a story; the latter is just a man without a foot.
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Re: World Press Photo winners announced

Post by nikonnl »

The World Press Photo Contest - based in Amsterdam - is to promote and support news photography and photo-journalism since 1955. Corporate sponsors are Canon (for some 18 years!) and TNT. Not only shooting a picture but also editing the picture is (nowadays) important. Thousands of professional photographers will never sent any picture to whatever contest. I've never done this and I will never paticipate in whatever contest. As we have to live with 'incident journalism' we also have to live with 'incident photography'.That's why war and disaster pictures are scoring high since decades.
Among general newspaper readers there is a special category that is sending letters to the editor frequently. Among many photographers there is a special category that is sending pictures to contest organizing organisations. I have more respect for those that do their job without exhibiting their work.
Regards,
Nico
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