The Rhetoric of Prize Winning Photographs

Is it a fake? Is it pho­to­shopped? Is it real? Paul Hansen’s win­ner of the 2012 World Press Pho­to com­pe­ti­tion is just the lat­est exam­ple of more than 100 years of con­tin­u­ous dis­cus­sions about the manip­u­la­tion of photographs.

How­ev­er, instead of ask­ing only if prize win­ning images are manip­u­lat­ed (and of course in some way they all are), we should also ask why are they changed to become the way they are? Or, to put it dif­fer­ent­ly: what kinds of pho­tographs win awards? When we look clos­er at the chang­ing styles of the win­ning pho­tographs since the begin­ning of the World Press Pho­to com­pe­ti­tion in 1955, we see that Hansen’s pic­ture is part of a cin­e­mat­ic form of expres­sion that has emerged in the last 6–7 years.

The image por­trays fam­i­ly mem­bers from Gaza car­ry­ing the bod­ies of a two small chil­dren to their bur­ial after being killed in an Israeli air strike. It is no coin­ci­dence that it has been called a movie poster. How­ev­er, the pho­to is more like a still; a sto­ry frozen in time, but con­densed with motion and move­ment, invit­ing us into a nar­ra­tive of what has hap­pened before, and what might hap­pen next. This new trend is dif­fer­ent from oth­er dom­i­nant styles among the WPP winners.

Some of the win­ning pic­tures hold what we can call news moments (sim­i­lar to Hen­ri Carti­er Bresson’s deci­sive moments). Most of the news moments are from the 1960s. A prime exam­ple is Eddie Adams’ 1968 pic­ture of the exe­cu­tion of a sus­pect­ed Viet Cong mem­ber, show­ing the exact moment of the bullet’s pen­e­tra­tion of the brain. The impact of the pic­ture lies pri­mar­i­ly in cap­tur­ing a cer­tain news event in a frac­tion a second.

The clos­er we get to this cen­tu­ry, the few­er pic­tures we see of such news moments. Instead we see more fea­ture-like pho­tographs cap­tur­ing – not a moment, but a gen­er­al sit­u­a­tion or con­di­tion. Take this win­ner from 2004 por­tray­ing a woman mourn­ing a rel­a­tive after the Asian tsuna­mi of Decem­ber 2003.

The pho­to is con­struct­ed around a jux­ta­po­si­tion between the dead body, rep­re­sent­ed by only an arm in the left of the frame, and the bereaved, rep­re­sent­ed by a woman lying face down on the sand in the right part of the frame. This kind of explic­it­ly artis­tic visu­al rhetoric pre­vailed from 2000–2004.

The 2001 win­ner por­trays how the body of a one-year-old boy who died of dehy­dra­tion is being pre­pared for bur­ial at Jalozai refugee camp in Pak­istan. It is a very rare exam­ple of a pic­ture being tak­en in a full bird’s eye per­spec­tive, direct­ly from above.

The pic­ture is dom­i­nat­ed by the white col­or of the drap­ing sheets, cov­er­ing the body of the lit­tle boy, so we only see the left side of his face. He seems at peace, and the pic­ture exudes calm­ness, giv­ing it an almost ethe­re­al dimen­sion. Com­bined with the angle of the arms drap­ing the sheets, the pic­ture is more an aes­thet­ic moment than it is a news moment.

Hansen’s pic­ture is nei­ther a news moment nor an aes­thet­ic moment – not to say, of course, that it does not have style. All images do. Instead the aes­thet­ic ten­den­cy exhib­it­ed in this pic­ture is a more of a kind of movie real­ism, a sort of pho­to­graph­ic cin­e­ma ver­ité. We see a sim­i­lar ten­den­cy in the win­ners from 2007, 2008, and 2009.

The 2007-win­ner shows a US sol­dier sink­ing onto an embank­ment in a bunker in Afghanistan. The 2008 win­ner depicts a police­man enter­ing a home in Cleve­land, USA, in order to check whether the own­ers have vacat­ed the premis­es. In 2009 we see women shout­ing their dis­sent from a Tehran rooftop fol­low­ing Iran’s dis­put­ed pres­i­den­tial election.

These images are not col­or­ful, there are no close ups, no clear, sim­ple or styl­ized com­po­si­tions, and no con­spic­u­ous jux­ta­po­si­tions or an obvi­ous use of some part to rep­re­sent a whole. They give the impres­sion of the fic­tion­al real­ism we some­times encounter at the cinema.

While the begin­ning of the decade pre­sent­ed pho­tographs that have their main rhetor­i­cal appeal in their com­po­si­tion­al and aes­thet­ic orga­ni­za­tion, these pho­tographs appeal more through sto­ry-mak­ing. The first kind invites the view­er inside the frame, encour­ag­ing explo­ration of the ele­ments in the visu­al moment, cap­ti­vat­ing us through visu­al design. The sec­ond kind invites the view­er out­side the frame, encour­ag­ing par­tic­i­pa­tion in the con­struc­tion of a nar­ra­tive, engag­ing us in spec­u­la­tions of what has hap­pened and what will happen.

This kind of neo-real­is­tic press pho­tog­ra­phy seems to be more open to inter­pre­ta­tion than the more obvi­ous sym­bol­ic pho­tos. The strange thing, though, is that the more the pic­tures draw us into a sto­ry of most­ly our own cre­ation, they seem to draw us away from the events they are depict­ing. They are all fab­u­lous images, but even when pro­vid­ed with the back­sto­ries I remain a spec­ta­tor immersed in the sto­ry, in awe of the art­work, wait­ing for the movie to premiere.

World Press Pho­to award-win­ning pho­tographs by Paul Hansen, Arko Dat­ta, Erik Refn­er, and (clock­wise from the upper left) Tim Het­her­ing­ton, Paul Hansen, Pietro Mas­tur­zo, and Antho­ny Suau.

This text has pre­vi­ous­ly been pub­lished on the site No Cap­tion Need­ed. If you are inter­est­ed in pho­to­jour­nal­ism, don’t miss it.