What the World Press Photo of the Year Means for Photography

In an increasingly fragmented world where the photojournalistic enterprise has lost much of its communal character—professional photographers have fewer venues which will support them to do this kind of work, readers are refusing to pay to see their imagery (if they can even find the work among the billions of photographs so rapidly posting online), and advertisers are refusing to support the publications that might have funded their work—the single photograph chosen to represent 2013, an extraordinarily turbulent and painful year, is a quiet, abstracted, ceremonial and quasi-religious image that references the difficulties of communication, difficulties shared by today’s photojournalistic community.