Suau and more

On the World Press Photo site you can see and hear jury chair MaryAnne Golon talking about the winning photo by Anthony Suau (and I also learnt that she at least pronounces his name An-thony with a “th” rather than in the normal British English fashion, and his second name as “swore”, so I shall have to learn to stop thinking of him as Antony Sow.)  She doesn’t talk about the way the figure with a gun is so clearly shown and dramatically in front of a white wall between two doorways, or that curious head he thrusts forwards behind the arm and gun makes him appear almost a cartoon figure projected on the scene, or how the simplicity of the upper half of the image and the chaos in the lower, but she does make some points about the image.

It’s well worth seeing the picture in the context of Suau’s essay on the site which got him a second prize for stories in the Daily Life section. Overall I think this is perhaps the most interesting story on the site, and one reason for this is the diversity of the ideas in this Time essay covering the crisis in the US economy (of course also something the rest of the world can thank America for.)

You can see his work Beyond the Fall on his web site and also on Time, (at least I think you can, though I’ve not managed to get beyond the opening sequence), with a work from a number of projects at Photoshelter and also on the Bill Charles site.

Elsewhere there is perhaps less of interest than in some years and there are a number of pictures and stories I find it hard to understand either why they are there or why they deserved their rather peculiar treatments by the photographers concerned. Sometimes competitions like this place too high a value on novelty without perhaps considering whether an artsy effect is anything more than that. But there is – as always – a considerable amount of work worth looking at.

Among work that particular caught my eye was the work by Davide Monteleone (Italy, Contrasto) taken in Abkhazia in September-October that won him first prize for General News stories, Polish photographer Tomasz Gudzowaty‘s Child jockey, Mongolia (3rd prize sports singles in Sport Features), and a story on where homeless people sleep in São Paulo, Brazil by Carlos Cazalis (Mexico, Corbis) which gained first prize in Contemporary Issues.

Interestingly the 3rd prize in Spot News stories went to Wojciech Grzedzinski, (Poland, Napo Images for Dziennik) for a set of images from the conflict in Georgia which included images of the same two men that became the subject of controversy on the Internet over photographs by Gleb Garanich and David Mdzinarishvili of Reuters which I covered in my post Byzantine Photographs last August. Although I found that the pictures showed no evidence that would make me in any way doubt their veracity, despite the comments of conspiracy theory obsessed bloggers, it does go to suggest that the world which is covered by news photography is perhaps a rather smaller place than we might hope.

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