2024-02-21 02:10:43
Two prestigious photography competitions, the World Press Photo and the Sony World Photography Awards, have a complicated system and are lost in a thicket of rules. Few people understand them, including photographers who are interested in these competitions. And even fewer people know what is hidden in the rules and instructions for juries. In World Press Photo, for example, the judges are supposed to be guided by gender and where the photographer lives when evaluating.
If you don’t want to believe it’s possible, here’s a quote straight from the World Press Photo competition website: “To ensure that the judges are diverse, World Press Photo has established the following representation criteria:
- At least one local winner from each region;
- at least one winner who identifies as a woman or non-binary person in each region.”
In other words: Of the four winners in each region, up to two are always determined based on gender and local quota. We don’t know how often the jury has to apply the quotas, but theoretically speaking, they can affect up to half of the winners in the regional (meaning continental) rounds.
It cannot be explained other than that the jury will push aside the higher quality photos when necessary and prefer the lower quality ones in order to fulfill the binding directive. It is part of the new rules and new structure of the competition, which apply from 2021.
Should gender affect winning a photo contest?
The organizers of World Press Photo believe that quotas are essential. They are based on the fact that the photo contest used to be won mainly by white men from Europe or the USA. The new rules also want to give a chance to other photojournalists: women, non-binary people, people coming from Africa, Asia and other previously neglected areas.
It is undoubtedly the right idea, guided by the pursuit of universal equality. But the execution is quite clumsy in my opinion. Shouldn’t the world’s best photojournalism decisions be based solely on their quality? Why should it be influenced by gender and nationality quotas? After all, if I favor one, I harm another.
In addition, the introduction of quotas created a very paradoxical situation. Photographers may not submit images to the competition that are modified and do not correspond to reality. However, the jury itself performs just such a manipulation of reality when evaluating the competition. Thanks to quotas, it reflects reality in a better form than the real one. The argument against manipulating photos is that people can’t trust photojournalism. The argument against manipulating competition results with quotas is analogous: How can we trust them then?
Photo: Tomáš Vocelka
Photographers from groups that, for many serious reasons, have less chance to succeed and establish themselves in photojournalism, in my opinion, would be better supported in the form of grants, paid internships, top workshops and various other programs that would help them establish themselves under fair conditions ( when the quality of their work is decisive). Artificially improving statistics with quotas does not solve anything. It is Potemkin’s village painting reality in slightly nicer colors (the share of participants who do not identify as male increased from 15 to 23 percent after the introduction of quotas, i.e. to a figure exactly corresponding to the quota).
The new World Press Photo structure suppresses images from everyday life
In 2021, World Press Photo also abolished the system of ten categories (Current Affairs, Reportage, Sports, Portrait, etc.) In its place came a new arrangement. There are now only four categories: Single image, Series, Long-term project and Free format.
First, the winners of these categories in the six continental regions (Africa, Asia, Europe, South America, Central and North America, and Southeast Asia and Oceania) will be announced. Then the world champions are chosen from them.
The goal of changing the system was also an effort to show life in its full breadth and variety. However, I think the result is the opposite. The themes of wars, disasters and human misfortune (those that have the best chance of world victory) were given a much greater emphasis than before.
On the contrary, the things that used to balance the flood of drastic shots in World Press Photo are being lost. Sport, nature and themes reflecting everyday life have disappeared. And that’s bad, journalism (which World Press Photo represents) should not only deal with negative phenomena in its own interest. People can only react to the flood of bad news in one way: stop reading it, for the sake of their own mental health.
Sony World Photography Awards: too many winners?
Photographers’ interest in World Press Photo is not decreasing, but at the same time they are looking for opportunities to use their photos elsewhere. Many of them, although they are excellent, lost a real chance to succeed in this competition. Authors then often turn to, for example, the Sony World Photography Awards, which have gained a reputation as one of the most important and at the same time the largest photography competitions in the world.
Photo: Tomáš Vocelka
However, even these World Photography Awards suffer from several ailments. The main one is the extreme complexity of the competition system and the excessive number of winners of various calibers. An ordinary mortal would probably hardly understand, for example, this:
Anyone (amateur and professional) can enter the Professional and Open parts of the competition. Each of them has ten categories. The words Professional and Open are confusing, in fact they have no real meaning. Professional should actually be labeled Photoseries and Open Singles.
The ten winners in the Professional categories can compete for the title of Photographer of the Year for the overall world winner, while the Open winners cannot compete for this title without an explanation somewhere.
On the contrary, national and regional winners are selected and announced from the people registered in the Open category, but the participants of the Professional competition cannot become them. Again, the question is: Why?
People have no idea that there are first, second and third category winners
All of this is then reflected in the announcement of the results, which the Sony World Photography Awards dose gradually, in several waves. National and regional winners are announced among the first. And since many journalists are not well versed in the rules of the competition, articles appear in the media: photographer XY won the Sony World Photography Awards.
I’ve already experienced the reactions of photography fans, who then shook their heads in disbelief: how could this image win such an important competition?
Actually, he didn’t win. Won in the national or regional round. If we were to compare it to Czech hockey, it corresponds to the announcement of the winners of the regional championship.
Then the winners of the Open category are announced. In a hockey comparison, they are the winners of the 1st hockey league. They cannot fight for the extraleague title “Photographer of the Year”.
At the very last moment, ten photographers from the Professional competition are announced, who will compete for the absolute world championship (in our hockey comparison, it would be a fight for victory in the extra league). What then is the reaction of the less initiated? “Ah, yet another winner of the Sony World Photography Awards.” And at the same time, it is about the ten most important prizes and an absolute world victory…
Both contests do a great job, but they make it too complicated
To be clear, I like both contests and think they do an invaluable job in promoting photography. But at the same time, they destroy it themselves with complicated and difficult to understand evaluation criteria and the complexity of the competition system.
I think the Sony World Photography Awards would benefit from canceling the national and regional awards, or at least moving them to a completely different time of the year. At the same time, it could consider renaming and aligning the two main parts of the competition, designated Professional and Open.
Calendar of photo contests
- Second half of February: Sony World Photography Awards – announcement of nominations in the Professional category
- April 3: Announcement of the regional winners of the World Press Photo winners
- April 18: announcement of the results of both the World Press Photo and Sony World Photography Awards
In the case of World Press Photo, it would be worth considering whether the previous version with ten globally rated categories was not better than the new one after all. I think she was. And by a lot.
If I were in the role of World Press Photo organizers, I would also consider abolishing gender and local quotas. I would replace them with a system of significant grant support and internships for photographers who are talented but do not have good starting conditions.
However, the organizers of both competitions may see it differently, and they have every right to do so.
The author of the text is the winner of the Architecture / Professional category in the Sony World Photography Awards 2021 and was among the ten finalists who fought for the absolute world victory.