I’m not a great fan of awards ceremonies – and the nonsense over things like the Oscars, BAFTA and the rest really turns me off, but perhaps I’d make an exception for the ICP Infinity Awards, which don’t seem to suffer from the same kind of sycophancy, in-breeding and embarrassing acceptance speeches.
There are certainly a number of worthy winners each year (and sometimes one or two I find hard to understand) and this year is no exception. You can see a video presentation on each of the winners on Mediastorm, and I’d particularly recommend watching the video on David Guttenfelder who won the Photojournalism Award – scroll down from that for the others. His isn’t a household name, even among photographers, but as a photographer for AP he has “spent the past 20 years of his life in some of the worst places in the world. He spent his 20s photographing bloodshed in Africa and his 30s reporting on the war in Afghanistan. Now the chief photographer for Asia, where he is primarily based in North Korea” and there are some fascinating images from there as well as a few which are perhaps more like we would expect from an AP correspondent covering official visits. As he says on the video, “the most mundane pictures sometimes are the ones that are the most powerful.”
I’ve not watched all of the other videos the whole way through, but I was also particularly impressed by Kitra Cahana, winner of the Young Photographer Award, and of course who could argue with the Cornell Capa Lifetime Achievement Award going to David Goldblatt – I’m only surprised he hadn’t already won it. His classic ‘On The Mines‘ has been on my bookshelves since it was first published in 1973, and I was pleased to see a revised version published last year by Steidl as the first in series on his work they are bringing out.
These videos were shown to the audience at the awards ceremony on May 1, and if you were disappointed not to get an invitation to be there in New York, console yourself that it’s probably better be able to watch them in the comfort of your own home, without any of the razzmatazz.
And thanks to one of my favourite photographers, Ami Vitale, who shared the link on Facebook with the message “David Guttenfelder is amazing. Beautiful story.”
Guttenfelder video is great – humanistic outlook – thanks for the link.