Photography News | Issue 33 | absolutephoto.com
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Competition
how is this maintained throughout the competition? Photography gives us a creative interpretation of the world. But when we want pictures to record and inform us of the varied events, issues, people, and viewpoints in our world, we must set limits to how pictures can be made. The World Press Photo Contest rewards pictures that are visual documents, providing an accurate and fair representation of the scene that the photographer witnessed. The audience should be able to trust in the accuracy and fairness of the prize-winning pictures. This means pictures entered into the contest must follow a series of guidelines that guard against manipulation. Manipulation is about altering the content of a picture. At almost every stage in the photographic process from capture, production, to the publication and circulation of photographic images, there is the potential for manipulation. This makes it difficult for a jury to comprehensively assess if and how pictures might have been manipulated, but the photographic contest guards against manipulation in two ways. Firstly, the World Press Photo
documentary categories, which are the most popular categories.
What was it about the winning image that made it stand out? One of the jurors, Vaughn Wallace, described this best: “We’ve seen thousands of images of migrants in every form of their journey, but this image really caught my eye. It causes you to stop and consider the man’s face, consider the child. You see the sharpness of the barbed wire and the hands reaching out from the darkness. This isn’t the end of a journey, but the completion of one stage of a very long future. And so, for me, this had to be the photograph of the year.” What do the judges look for in a winning image? As noted above, the criteria concerns the best single exposure pictures contributing to the past year of visual journalism. TheWorld Press Photo of the Year honours the photographer whose visual creativity and skills made a picture that captures or represents an event or issue of great journalistic importance in that year. are important in press photography, Truthful representations
Above World Press Photo Award Winner Warren Richardson, Australia, 2015, Hope for a New Life. Aman passes a baby through the fence at the Serbia/Hungary border in Röszke, Hungary, 28 August 2015.
Left Christian Ziegler, Germany, for National Geographic , Chameleon Under Pressure . Below left Kazuma Obara, Japan Exposure. Belowright Sergey Ponomarev, Russia, for The New York Times , Reporting Europe’s Refugee Crisis, 2015. Bottom left Abd Doumany, Syria, Agence France-Presse, Douma’s Children, Syria, 2015. Bottomright Christian Bobst, Switzerland, The Gris-gris Wrestlers of Senegal.
contest code of ethics sets out best practices for entrants to the contest, and it is backed by the requirement to provide detailed captions that are reviewed by the fact-checking of the winners. Secondly, the entry rules make clear that digital manipulation which adds, rearranges, reverses, distorts or removes people or objects from within the frame is not permitted, and the rules are backed by the forensic comparison of original camera files with the contest image in the second last round. Are there any specific types of images or styles that you see regularly or are you seeing fresh work? It is always a mix of the two. The chair of the general jury, Francis Kohn, director of photography at Agence France-Presse, described the debates this year: “At every step, we were looking in depth at every photo, considering both their aesthetic qualities and editorial content, listening regularly to captions in order to understand the intentions of the photographer, and evaluating the merit of their account. There were also many discussions on new approaches to telling a story. Could news photography be more daring, subtler, than what is the often classical, straightforward, mode of reporting? The jury was open to new approaches, but originality for the sake of originality did not win favour with the majority.” How does the judging process work and who was involved in this year’s panel? The judging process for the World Press Photo contest is intensive and rigorous. It involves five specialised juries and one general jury, and takes two weeks to complete. All the rules and procedures are published on our website. This year there were
19 professionals – 11 men and eight women – from 16 countries who did the judging, and you can see their biographical details on our website. What prizes were involved? There are first, second and third prizes in each category for both singles and stories. All winners receive a paid trip to Amsterdam for theAwardsCeremonyand the annual Awards Days. In addition, the photo of the year winner receives a cash prize of €10,000 and equipment from our worldwide partner, Canon. Where can we see the winning images? Allofthewinningimagesareavailable on our website and large selections are available in our yearbook and the travelling exhibition. The exhibition begins in Amsterdam, but will be seen in more than 100 locations in 45 countries by years end, having reached a global audience of four million people.
worldpressphoto.org
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