I’m often surprised and amused by how things link together when I’m looking at pages on the web, often finding things that link to posts I’ve made or thoughts I’ve had but not quite got around to writing about.
One of the latter was about another of those annual awards, POYi, (Pictures of the Year international) which is unusual in conducting its business in public, web-casting the judging with 99 on-line publicly open seats in a chatroom. The judging is spread out over most of the month, and has now more or less ended – so you will need to wait until next year to take part.
The Photojournalism Contest entry flowchart on the Shit Photojournalists Like blog has more than an element of truth in it, judging from the various shows and lists of winners I’ve seen over the years. Certainly they lead me to the conclusion I’ve always had about such competitions, “Save your entry fee and buy gear.” They also link to the POYi Chat Room Heroes blog, though I think you have to have been their to get much out of that.
One photographer who gets a particular mention is Melissa Little, whose work was apparently “pulled in, kicked out, pulled in, then kicked out again.” I don’t know what she had in for POYi, but you can see some interesting work on her own web site, where I find that in 2001 she was a student at the Eddie Adams Workshop and “have been honored to return for the last seven years as staff, where I’ve done everything from mow the grass and rake the leaves to documenting everything in sight as workshop photographer to leading, finding stories and coaching a team of 10 students. ”
I’ve not yet looked at all the awards for POYi, but did enjoy looking through the results for the ‘News Picture Story – Newspaper’ class, where first place went to
Michael Robinson Chavez (Los Angeles Times) for DECONSTRUCTING MUBARAK, second to Mads Nissen (Berlingske / Panos Pictures) for pictures of the LIBYAN REVOLUTION, third to Hiroto Sekiguchi (Yomiuri Shimbun) for TSUNAMI AFTERMATH and the ‘Award of Excellence to Craig Walker (The Denver Post) for his pictures of OCCUPY DENVER. And I mention this not just because there are some fine pictures in these stories (which are always of more interest to me than the single picture awards) but because of the controversy I may have mentioned earlier over World Press Photo, when some judges anounced publicly that they had seen no pictures of the Occupy movement worthy of an award. I don’t know if Walker’s work went to WPP as well, but certainly some other very worthy images did.