There is plenty of good photography in the winning work in the 2015 PDN Photo Annual, though there are some of the various categories that interest me less than others. They include quite a few that have me thinking ‘how slick’ rather than really appreciating, and rather too much ‘so-whattery’, but it’s easy to skip on to the more worthwhile.
As well as the well-known names, there are also quite a few new to me. If you are short of time, I’d recommend going to the Student section first. Much of the other good work you may already have seen, and this also seems to me the most consistently interesting group of work. And perhaps surprisingly given my lack of interest in most sports photography, the Sports section here (which I almost didn’t bother with) is one of the more interesting.
I think the PDN Gallery might be more useful if it featured rather fewer photographers – if you worked your way through all the work here and went on to follow the links to the websites you could spend a few weeks on this site. It perhaps isn’t as obvious as it might be that the ‘Next’ button at bottom right of the screen is a very good way to go through all the photographers in order, showing you the first of their images – and you can then either view more or quickly jump to the next person.