Category: Contests

After a rather drawn out back and forth with The Photographers Gallery they have provided me with the guidelines used by the jury and chair. You can read them in their entirety here, but I just want to focus here on the bits that relate to what I actually talked about in my piece: transparency and conflicts of interest. Before launching into that I think it’s worth mentioning that the gallery maintain the line that there was no conflict of interest in this year’s judging as the The Winners book was not part of the shortlisted exhibition. Milach states here that the series The Winners project was part of the shortlisted exhibition Refusal. I think the gallery are trying to draw a very fine semantic line in distinguishing between the project and the book in this way, but as we will see in a moment the competition guidelines give them that perogative, and that’s really the problem because as they stand the rules are incredibly open ended.

The photo, titled “Venezuela Crisis,” was one of 6 finalists that were named back in February — revealed ahead of time for the first time in the contest’s history. In a poll we conducted at the time, nearly 50% of readers voted for Schemidt’s photo as the most deserving to win World Press Photo of the Year, widely considered the world’s premier photojournalism photo contest.

The award winners were announced today at the World Press Photo Festival in Amsterdam. The other finalists for the photo of the year award included Ivor Prickett and Adam Ferguson, both freelance photographers for The New York Times, as well as Patrick Brown of Panos Pictures and Toby Melville of Reuters.

“It’s a classical photo, but it has an instantaneous energy and dynamic,” said Magdalena Herrera, director of photography at Geo France and the chair of this year’s jury. “The colors, the movement, and it’s very well composed, it has strength. I got an instantaneous emotion.”

This review concerns The Deutsche Börse Foundation Prize hosted at The Photographers Gallery in London, a competition which I have written about many times before, and which I make no bones about having very mixed feeling about it, both because of the sponsor, and because of what I feel is the generally unhealthy effect that prizes often have on the creative fields

Once someone is sanctified as a legend, it can be hard to remember that they were once normal, hard working individuals like ourselves. In recognition of this sad fact, which deprives us of the hope that we, too, can become legends, we’ve compiled a list of various legends-to-be. These men and women, who straddle the line between highly proficient and legendary–each inching their way towards the latter–show us that legendary status is often far from preordained, resulting instead from decades of dedication and constant reinvention. So, keep your eyes on this group as they continue to evolve, and, don’t forget: we told you so.

Smithsonian.com has just announced the winning photos of its 2017 Photo Contest, the 15th edition of the contest. The grand prize winner this year was photographer Thong Huu for his photo above, titled “Breakfast at the Weekly Market.”