You can now look at all the winning images in the 58th World Press Photo Contest, selected from the 97,912 images submitted by 5,692 photographers of 131 nationalities on the World Press Photo site.
I haven’t yet had the time to look through all the pictures from 2014 in the 2015 Photo Contest, but my initial impression is that the organisers have tried hard to get away from the accusations that every year is the same, and the selection looks as if they have adopted of rather wider approach than in some previous years.
As usual there is likely to be disagreement about the winning image, Jon and Alex by Danish photographer Mads Nissen, a member of Panos Pictures, from his coverage of the increasing hostility in Russia towards lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people. Although I think its a good image, I wonder if it really is the most outstanding of the crop.
One of the jury, Alessia Glaviano comments on WPP:
“The photo has a message about love being an answer in the context of all that is going on in the world. It is about love as a global issue, in a way that transcends homosexuality. It sends out a strong message to the world, not just about homosexuality, but about equality, about gender, about being black or white, about all of the issues related to minorities.”
and another, Donald Weber stated:
“World Press Photo is more interesting than being just a competition. The winning image fosters debate not only within the photo community, about who we are and where we’re going and what we’re trying to say, but also in the larger community. The images are seen and discussed by tens of thousands of people.”
This year the WPP insisted on having the original camera files as well as the finished image, and their experts “found anomalies in a large number of files and presented their findings to the jury“, resulting in 20% the images that reached the penultimate round being eliminated “because of removing small details to ‘clean up’ an image, or sometimes by excessive toning that constitutes a material change to the image.”
I’m both pleased that the WPP is taking a firm stand, and also very surprised at the level of unacceptable retouching, particularly as they had made it clear that they would be checking for it. It suggests that many photographers (or their agencies) have failed to appreciate that there is any problem in altering news images.
As they say:
“There is clearly an urgent need to take this matter further. Over the coming months, we will be engaging in further dialogue with the international photojournalistic community to explore what we can learn from all this, and how we can create a deeper understanding of issues involved in the application of post-processing standards in professional photojournalism.”