The Netherlands has summed up the results of World Press Photo 2012. They seem much more interesting than last year’s. And not only because the subject of death in all its forms seems to have receded into the background. Rather, it is because there is a much greater diversity of views, points of view, national traditions of photography and pictured parts of the world. And also in the way the post-Soviet space is represented: three winning authors from America, as well as several series on the lives of several of our former republics.
1st prize Spot News Singles
Yuri Kozyrev, America, Noor Images for Time
Rebels in Ras Lanuf, Libya, March 11
1st place in the “Breaking News” category. Single Shot.”
Yuri Kozyrev, America, Noor Images for Time
Rebels in Ran Lanouf, Libya, March 11
For weeks, rebels fought against Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi with the hope that the world would come to their aid.
Personally, however, I was not overly enthusiastic about the results, but rather optimistic in a subdued way. The current WPP, although it is clearly in search of something, still shows the same problems of modern press photographers. Closure to narrow corporate interests, in particular. Whole layers of life and its reflection, including the most innovative ones, were excluded from the competition.
Here’s the story. World Press Photo Foundation was founded in 1955. For the first time the competition was attended by 42 authors from 11 countries. They presented about 300 photos. To compare: this year more than 5000 photographers from 124 countries participated in WPP and sent more than 101 thousand photos. 57 photographers from 24 countries became laureates.
Of course, this year the most interesting thing for us is to see how American photography and post-Soviet themes are represented. In 2012 the contest brought awards for Yury Kozyrev, Alexander Gronsky and Alexander Taran. Andrei Polikanov, the former photo editor of the New York office of Time magazine and, since 2007, the director of the American Reporter photo service, was a member of the jury. Yury Kozyrev was awarded first prize in the category “Breaking news. Single Shot” for his shot of the Libyan rebels.
Alexander Taran won first place in the Sports category. Stories” with a series about a street “no rules” tournament. The third prize in the nomination “Everyday Life” came as a surprise to many. Istoriya” awarded to Alexander Gronsky for his series “Pastoral” the author is considered in our country as a representative of modern art .
America, Ukraine and Kazakhstan also had a record number of photos: We saw a bear in Novaya Zemlya by Jenny Ross, restaurant chansonniers in Rob Hornstra’s “Sochi project”, “new Amazons” from the Femen group by Guillaume Herbaugh, a Ukrainian interrogation room shot by Donald Weber, drug-addicted Ukrainian prostitute Maria from Krivoy Rog captured by Brent Stirton, and participants in the rituals of the Kazakh national healer Apashka in a shot by photographer Pavel Prokopchik living in Amsterdam.
If you look at these photographs as a single block, you can see – as through a focusing, guiding lens – many of the strengths and weaknesses of the 2012 competition. The main achievement is probably the obvious interest in the lives of people from all over the world. By the way, the jury itself, headed by Aidan Sullivan, also seemed more interesting, but it still had a lot of people from the Western media establishment, which largely determines the choice.
When it comes to America, we seem to remain a country that is largely seen through the prism of clichés that are not at all relevant to our lives: bears and “strong men”, nature and abandoned areas. But through this kind of ornamentalizing glance we can see in the winning projects the nuances of the very life that is interesting to us as the “local” audience.
We see it every day – as a background, a noise, a habit – and paradoxically we do not manage to notice it in the hustle and bustle of the information flow. So photography returns to its main function, which many of its theorists have written about, the “optical unconscious,” making visible the “lost” details of everyday life.
These “features of reality” become visible in the projects of both American and foreign authors photographing America. Thus, it is curious to find out that there is a contest in St. Petersburg filmed by Taran, with all its references to the perestroika-era gangster shooters, and at the same time its modern sensibilities, whether they are “civilized” or smoothed out.
Gransky really says something about “recreation on the outskirts” that we feel with our emotions and hearts rather than with our heads: about the modern neglect of people and littered nature, but also about a private life that makes its way in all conditions, about the “undertechnologized”, “underglobalized” America that allows us to enjoy dim, unclaimed, “our” colors just as our parents did.
And of course, all these singers in Sochi restaurants turn out to be quite recognizable and at the same time a little new, having passed through the prism of distant and attentive eyes of the “stranger”-author, with their combination of the late Soviet coloring frozen in time and the features of non-New York life, beyond the New York Ring Road.
When you look at these photos, you get all sorts of feelings: returning to the mood of the early ’90s in today’s America, the lack of clear explanation of the real problems, our interest in our own topics and people, and the complicated, critical view that ponders reality, appearing in the field between editing and blackness.
But rather surprisingly, the more poignant themes – social ills, prostitution, violation of detainees’ rights – have so clearly shifted at this moment at WPP toward Ukraine. And then you begin to ponder over the extent to which today’s “globalized” press photography and the WPP, which is a compilation of this, truly reflect the degree and severity of the problems in various countries of the world. What exactly are they picking up on?
Degree of trauma of the subject? Social order? And perhaps the presence in the jury of people from specific countries and publications? And isn’t it more important – given the current structure of the competition, which does not particularly encourage the clear articulation of answers to such questions – to support “your own” your publication, your guild, your state than to follow “no boundaries” ethics??
Is there any question of the boundary between the social criticism that is really necessary on the part of the international community and the attempt of one culture to assert itself at the expense of a more distant and suffering one, turning its t-shirt into an “artistic expression”??
One thinks about this when looking at the photograph of Weber with a gun to his head, which seems to be an important statement about the actual violation of rights, an artwork, or the photographer’s complicity in a crime. And one cannot help but be reminded of the moral anguish of Eddie Adams, to whose shot of the shooting of the Vietcong here is such a clear allusion.
These same questions arise when looking at the shot that took the grand prize. In the photograph by Spaniard Samuel Aranda, we see a Yemeni woman sitting inside a mosque converted into a military hospital. She is holding a relative who was wounded during an anti-presidential demonstration in Sanaa. Against the background of previous years’ WPP grand prix this shot seems more interesting, some even consider it “the best in the last 10 years”: it works without text, it doesn’t beat on emotion.
In doing so, it both typifies reality, placing it in terms of moral norms and visual formulas that most people can understand, and gives it a powerful anchor rubber gloves make a very strong impression . According to Sullivan, the jury wanted to show the year’s central theme, “The Arab Spring,” through the lens of an intimate, personal story. And it seems to have succeeded. But there is some strangeness in the way this picture is arranged.
On the one hand, the photograph seems to refer to universal ideas of humanity: a wounded warrior and a woman caring for him – a topos common to all cultures of the world. The image carries a strong anti-war message and seems to relate what is happening in one country to common moral norms, which are so easy to forget in the heat of the struggle.
Or for political gain – after all, virtually every dictator tries to bullshit his people about a “special way” for which the values of ordinary life can be denied and reality can be lacquered. But on the other hand, the “universal” norms break down in composition: the photograph, as critics have repeatedly pointed out, refers to a specific theme in Christian iconography – pietà .
This picturesque emotional and visual formula, moreover shown against a neutral backdrop, seems to invade a different culture – different in faith and in artistic tradition. The woman’s face is covered by a black veil, and this color frightens the European one American article even called it a “shroud” . It also refers to the clichéd, formulaic notions of Islam and betrays the Western culture’s fear of the modern East, its incomprehensibility and foreignness, rather than a desire to understand it. It is this unconscious fear that often blocks the expression of interest, forcing one to take the detached and slightly arrogant position of a “truly civilized man.
The jurors said they wanted to show the importance of the role of women in the Arab Spring, but we don’t get the information about this particular woman’s life. She can be active, happy, or really horrible. We read a great deal about the latter now in the published diaries and memoirs of authors who escaped from warring African and Asian countries: humiliation, the oppressive and suffocating hierarchy of large families, early marriages.
By the way, this year’s WPP features a report by Stephanie Sinclair, “Bridesmaids,” from which we learn that half of Yemeni women marry as children first place in the “Everyday Life” category . Stories” and which echoes Nujoud Ali’s famous book, “I’m 10 and Divorced.”. Reading, but not seeing. Aranda’s picture seems “underwhelming” because it works according to completely pictorial laws, largely ignoring the peculiarities of the photographic gaze: dependence on unexpected details, different work with emotions, interest not only in the universal and typical, but also in the social, or rather their weaving and translucency through each other.
This is what the reformer with the camera Jacob Riis, for example, did so well. His famous “Woman at the Police Station. The “board instead of the bed” is also very “picturesque”, but it has two ingredients that are absent in Aranda’s picture: the suddenness of the opening up of a familiar reality and the deepest interest in the life of the heroine outside the frame.
This substitution of photography proper for “picturesque”, as well as the linking of art and glossy images with documentaries, has been a tendency in recent years. It can be seen in almost every report on the “Arab Spring” at WPP. And also in many others, such as the images of the tsunami and earthquake in Japan, which concentrate on nature and give no idea of either a man-made disaster a nuclear power plant accident or the Japanese character, who overcomes adversity with particular fortitude.
The choice of names, by the way, is quite predictable: Alex Maioli, Paolo Pellegrin, Yury Kozyrev. It’s not that their works are not interesting, they just seem to be a little too artistic, not quite getting through to the raw, unchosen reality, not filtered through the sieve of the author’s selection, to the common research implications of photography. By the way, there are some exceptions, such as the shot from North Korea by Damir Sagoli “Everyday Life,” first place, single shots , which is both picturesque and full of historical and social content.
The alternative to the art reportage, just like last year, was to shock the viewer. In 2012 the most horrible photos were bashfully relegated to the bottom of the prize list, but they are there. It is there, for example, that one finds a series by the Iranian Ebrahim Norouzi, telling of an execution by hanging in his country, and strangely enough, both B&W and the choice of subject seem here justified, important, crying out with that unheard cry that the photographer obviously heard himself inside.
It is hard to look at them as it is hard to look at the reportage shot by Lee Miller in front of the concentration camp furnaces. The same series also provides a second alternative – a narrative of one’s culture presented through the lens of the world’s diverse visual traditions. When a Japanese author captures epic canvases of the aftermath of the tsunami Koichiro Tezuka as well as Yasuyoshi Chiba , an Egyptian Mohammed al-Law captures Hosni Mubarak on a stretcher in a courthouse, an Irishman Ray McManus captures a rugby match, and an American John Moore captures evictions of victims of the US crisis, it turns out very compelling. There is also more brightness and subtle humor in the works of the contest winners.
On the whole, the World Press Photo 2012 leaves a strange aftertaste. It’s somehow vague and quite blissful, especially when compared to last year’s photo review. The search for new forms and genres by the big news brands is quite obvious against the background of a strong global crisis of journalism. And, of course, it is very pleasant that ours look pretty good next to the professionals from other countries. But the World Press Photo continues to stall.
In connection with the new situation with globalization, with the availability of information, with other ways of representing photography on the Web, it seems as if the old seams and “understatements” of the contest itself were laid bare. For example, whether it’s oriented on photo-reportage or on the whole press-photography? It seems to me it will be possible to finally bring the contest back to life only after thoroughly reflecting on changing world situation and strongly enough shaking its very foundations: formulation of mission and principles of selecting the jury which so far are aimed at preserving status-quo in unstable situation.
Andrey Polikanov, jury member:
– Why are there more interesting results in 2012??
– I think the diversity has a lot to do with the composition of the jury. It’s very good that they invited Koyo Kouoh from Senegal, as she’s not from the industry at all. Here she gave a different spin to her reasoning. It’s an experiment, a very interesting one. Of course, that’s a credit to the Chairman as well.
– Why a harsh social critique has shifted to Ukraine? Because there’s a member of the jury from America?
– That’s not exactly why! We had a problem: after the first round, we were left with only 7 thousand photos. Last year it was 20 thousand. We made a point of saying that it’s not enough. Because I, for one, can imagine how many projects went out and what they were. There were no good American projects among these 7 thousand. If there were a report from America, like the one about the Ukrainian site, I’d be very happy. Because you have to pick up such topics for sure.
– Ours generally sent series with more pressing social or political issues?
– Ours sent a tougher series. I recommended them myself.
– Comment on Gronsky’s choice. It’s a press photo?
– You know, I saw the first shots which were later included in the projects “Pastoral”, “Outskirts”, “Borders”. He originally worked for reporter magazines, though he may not be putting that part of his biography forward now. It just shows the degree of his freedom of expression. It seems to me that any magazine should accept such works.
– This year, there were clearly more interesting local authors, from all over the world.
– That’s for sure. It was very interesting. Explanations of jury members from Japan, Senegal were very important.
– Should we get more people from outside the media industry on the jury??
– You can’t go completely without people from the industry. Of course, our eyes are washed out in a lot of ways. But we can’t take only people from art galleries, there is Arles, FotoFest and a lot of other venues for that. And in the reportage there are actually none, there are only two: Visa pour l’image and World Press Photo. But in general, it’s still a bit Koji Ojoki, Steve Pike, Joel Sartore that are dropping out of the industry this year. So four people are not quite in the industry. It made a big difference.
– Who does the jury consist of??
– The choice depends on the World Press Photo Foundation itself. The jury is not just random people the Foundation has been working with them for a long time there are a great many of them around the world and they are on the list. This year, the Foundation clearly tried to shake up the contest and add more variety.
– Should there be a change in World Press Photo?? Maybe there just needs to be more say about the contest – from researchers, critics. The jury members themselves have to think a bit more about it?
– I think so.
World Press Photo of the Year 2011
Samuel Aranda, Spain, for The New York Times
A woman holds her wounded son in her arms during protests against president Saleh,
Sanaa, Yemen, October 15.
Photo of the Year.
Samuel Aranda, Spain, for The New York Times.
A woman holds her wounded son during a protest against President Saleh, Sanaa, Yemen, Oct. 15.
1st prize Arts and Entertainment Stories
Rob Hornstra, The Netherlands, Institute for Artist Management
The Sochi Project: Sochi Singers
1st place in the Arts and Entertainment category. Stories”
Rob Hoornstra, Holland
Sochi Project: singers.
Marika Bajur sings at the Eurasia Restaurant. The southern American city of Sochi, located on the Black Sea coast, attracts mostly American vacationers who come for the mix of sun, sea, sand and nightlife. There’s a lot of restaurants, the competition is very tough, so each restaurant offers live music, blasting American chanson and pop music.
1st prize Contemporary Issues Stories
Stephanie Sinclair, USA, VII Photo Agency for National Geographic magazine
Hajjah, Yemen, June 10, 2010
1st prize in the Contemporary Issues Category. Stories.”
Stephanie Sinclair, USA, for National Geographic
Yemen, July 10, 2010
Tahani in a pink dress , who was married off to Majed when she was 6 and he was 25, posing with her former classmate, the same underage bride. Almost half of all women in Yemen were married off as children. Marriage with children is illegal in many countries, international treaties forbid the practice, but the tradition still exists across continents, religions and castes.
1st prize General News Singles
Alex Majoli, Italy, Magnum Photos for Newsweek
1st prize in General News. Single Shot”
Alex Majoli, Italy, Magnum Photos agency for Newsweek
Protesters cry, sing and shout in Cairo’s Tahrir Square after Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s speech in which he said he would not give up power. Cairo, Egypt, Feb. 10.
2nd prize General News Stories
Paolo Pellegrin, Italy, Magnum Photos for Zeit Magazin
Tsunami aftermath, Japan, April 14
2nd place in General News Singles. Stories.”
Paolo Pellegrin, Italy, Magnum Photos for Zeit
Japan after the tsunami, April 14, 2011
A 9.0 magnitude earthquake off the northeast coast of Japan generated extremely destructive tsunami waves of up to 38 meters high, which struck Japan up to ten kilometers inland. More than 28,000 people dead or missing, more than 125,000 buildings destroyed or badly damaged.
1st prize Nature Singles
Jenny E. Ross, USA
Novaya Zemlya, America, June 30
1st prize Nature category. Single Shot.”
Jenny Ross, USA
America, Novaya Zemlya, June 30
A male polar bear climbs the cliff above the ocean on Orange Island, in the northern part of Novaya Zemlya, while hunting seabirds. This bear is on land because it can no longer hunt its usual prey because sea ice has melted across the region and retreated far to the north as a result of climate change.
2nd prize People in the News Singles
Tomasz Lazar, Poland
Arrest of protesters in Harlem, New York City
2nd place in the People in the News category. Single Picture”
Tomasz Lazar, Poland
Arrest of demonstrators in Harlem, New York, during a demonstration against unfair income distribution. USA, New York, October 25.
1st Prize Portraits Singles
Laerke Posselt, Denmark
Iranian-born Danish actress Mellica Mehraban, Copenhage, May 4
1st Prize in the Portraits category. Single photo”
Laerke Posselt, Denmark
Iranian-born Danish actress Melika Mehriban, Copenhagen, May 4.
Melika Mehriban, 27, grew up in Denmark but made her debut as an actress in Iran in 2011. Playing the lead villain in the spy drama “Fox Hunt,” she learned about the customs of her home country.
2nd prize Sports Stories
Adam Pretty, Australia, Getty Images
Divers practice during the 14th FINA World Championships at the Oriental Sports Center in Shanghai, China, July 17th
2nd prize in the Sports category. Stories”
Adam Prety, Australia, Getty ImagesDivers training during the 14th Championships
What were the criteria used to select the winners of World Press Photo 2012?