The annual World Press Photo awards were announced on Friday and a controversial issue has been raised in the process to decide this year’s overall winner.
John Stanmeyer, a photojournalist for the New York-based agency VII, won the 2014 contest with an image taken from the shores of Djibouti showing Ethiopian, Eritrean and Somali immigrants at night trying to get signals on their cell phones. He is also one of the founding members of VII.
Among the judges for this year’s contest was the chair, Gary Knight, also a founding member of VII. Some in the photojournalism industry are saying this is a clear conflict of interest and that Knight should have recused himself from judging.
“Knight and Stanmeyer are business partners,” Benjamin Chesterton, chief administrator of the award-winning digital production company DuckRabbit, told MintPress on Monday.
“A clear conflict of interest compounded by the fact that their business stands to profit from the decision of the jury led by Knight. It’s inevitable that conflicts of interest will take place. Good governance comes down to how institutions deal with them. On this front World Press continue to undermine their own credibility with some wilfully self destructive governance.”
On the other side of the coin, photojournalism, internationally speaking, is a small community, so it would be difficult for “incestual” relationships to develop within the industry when it comes to awards. Exacerbating that idea is the fact that only a few agencies have the resources to bring quality stories and images to light.
“I have news for you, if you are going to select photojournalists to vote on photojournalism, there is a very good chance that they either know each other, work, or have worked together or even are brothers (or sisters),” Paul Melcher wrote on his photo-industry blog, Thoughts of a Bohemian.
“It’s just a very small community. The only way to alleviate that would be to have a People’s choice category, something we have written about already.”
Knight made some controversial comments to the British Journal of Photography on Friday regarding what he felt was a diminished pool of applicants and images as compared to that from years past.
“I felt there was material gap in the way the world was covered and in the quantity and quality of the strong stories that we were presented with,” Knight told BJP.
“For example, one might expect that certain issues would be very well covered, that you would have five, 10 or 15 well-executed stories to choose from, let’s say, 10 years ago when you had Paris Match, Stern, Spiegel, Time, Newsweek and everybody else assigning photographers on a regular basis to go and cover these important stories. This year, most of these important stories were photographed by very few photographers. You didn’t have depth in each issue and each event.”
He added that many of the submissions had not been “well developed,” which left him thinking, according to the BJP interview, that many of the images he viewed for consideration in the contest had not been edited well, and that they lacked narrative.
“Both in terms of depth and breadth, I noticed that something was missing,” Knight said. “If you look at the organisations that have won awards — National Geographic, The New York Times, AP, AFP and Reuters — it’s evident that there’s very few [institutions] left that can still afford to provide resources to photographers. I’m seeing in these awards the real-life consequence of the lack of resources that photographers have to go out into the world and cover stories with any depth at all.”
So is Knight saying that if you don’t work for ‘Big Photo’ that you’ll never have a shot at being considered for bigtime recognition by your peers? Or worse yet, that if you don’t work for one of the major photo houses that budding shooters will never be considered a part of the peer group … the tribe, if you will? No.
As Melcher noted, “Are @NatGeo @nytimes @AP @AFP and @Reuters really that dominant when it comes to quality stories and viable choices for elite photo awards, or are we thinking and hearing that because the photojournalism world is so small and these organizations, as intermingled as they are with the community, exercise that much influence and earn that much deference?
“Surveying the winning World Press photos, one can feel satisfaction that many photographers and projects were selected this year that weren’t commissioned or procured out of a corporate suite or through well-worn relationships. If the choice of Mr. Stanmeyer’s photo is to be more than just a crowd pleaser, let part of the discussion have to do (inspired by those immigrants hungry for a signal) with photojournalism sharing the juice.”
Makes sense, but hopefully independent freelance photojournalists will still be able to find ways to document their stories, and get recognition, without being snuffed out by those who judge World Press Photo’s contest every year.
No one is really alleging there’s a fix in the contest, but making it more accountable to these industry debates seems to make sense to many.
However, as DuckRabbit told MintPress further, “World Press Secretary David Campbell won’t even admit that there is a conflict.
“I’m perplexed by that. At the end of the judging you have nine people in a room, two photos and there’s a vote. The majority wins. That means the winning image could come down to a single vote given by a business partner of the winner. Is that fair? I don’t think so. Just to re-iterate I’m not saying that Knight did this, I’m saying that World Press have their head in the sand if they don’t see it as a problem. It distracts from the winning photograph, which is fabulous.”
But let’s not fool ourselves here — intermingling is a part of the business. And as much as photographers want to say it isn’t about competition, there’s a thrill in making a front page over a friend, or a world-renowned photographer, also working on the same story, like in spot news.
Further, the big bosses with the wire services, major newspapers and photo agencies look at their subordinates work like a competition every single day. If you don’t win the front-page, top-fold feature image, they’ve lost the day — and profits sink.
That’s the reality of the industry.