There will be blood

February 12, 2010 by pmelcher.

If you like blood, you will love the new crop of World Press Awards winners. There is a lot of it, in full details and in brilliant colors. Hopefully for you, you will not look at the galleries just after eating, the results might not get along with your stomach.

The top winner, an image of a woman on a Tehran roof shooting news during the Iranian election protest shouldn’t have won. Why ? Because it is part of a series of images that Italian photographer Pietro Masturzo has done on the antiquated way Iranians communicated during the uprising. It is much stronger as part of the set than as a standalone. Obviously the jury doesn’t know the difference between a single shot and a narrative. This is not a single shot. It makes it seem that the other images are useless. They are not.

Elsewhere in the prizes, you see a lot of winners depicting the Gaza war from the Palestinian side. Obviously the jury had a political statement to make and they made it loud and clear. Too loud and clear. The result puts in jeopardy their ability the find the real best images rather than those images that agree with their very one sided and opinionated point of view.

The rest of the winners follow a similar pattern . Lot’s of violence and blood, if possible, too much Black and white (They can’t shake off  that old cliche that B/W makes it more..intellectual, more valuable somehow), interrupted with portrait galleries, something that has been plaguing European photojournalism for quite some time.

What will have everybody talking about this year, will be the  “Special Mention, recognizing a frame grab from a video posted on YouTube in June 2009 during the post-election uprising in Iran.”

Awarded to Reuters (?), not only it’s a video grab ( Still photography is dead !!)  , it was shot by an amateur ( here comes the citizen photojournalist !!) and was probably shot on a camera phone ( dump the DLSR, phones are the new cameras !!). Well, you can just imagine the rest.

Finally, true to itself, still no multimedia awards of any kind . Take a look and make a your decision :

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