Time to rethink the whole World Press Photo project from the ground up. If they ever get serious about catching up with where “press photography” has gone since 1955, WPP might want to scrap the entire process of Academy Awards-style categories and prizes, and become instead a serious forum for discussion of information-based, issue-oriented imagery in the new media environment. […]
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It’s not to much to ask of a western European NGO that it revitalize itself after half a century of same old same old. It’s in that spirit — hoping for signs of some tectonic shift, though not expecting any — that I accepted the invitation to attend the opening reception for World Press Photo 2012 in the Main Gallery of the Visitors’ Lobby at United Nations Headquarters in Manhattan on August 15. […] I’ve tracked the “pepper-spray copy” story here at Photocritic International because it’s as vivid and immediate an example of the potency of citizen journalism via the lens media as a commentator on lens culture like myself could want. I’ve said, from the beginning, that without Lt. John Pike’s bring-it-on turning of this situation into a police-brutality photo op in front of a crowd of amateur paparazzi, heads would not have started to roll at UC Davis and he would not have become an international symbol of uniformed thuggery. […] The tribulations of Kodak and Olympus impinge less directly and severely on the field of creative photography, where I concentrate my attention as a critic and journalist. Yet they too seem to signify the end of an era in which major-league companies identified so strongly with photography constituted an industry from which no one anticipated anything but ongoing strength and steady growth. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |
Election 2012: Image World (13)
The sheer quantity of visual imagery disseminated today during a national election, its diversity of forms, its variety of sources and distribution methods, and the rapidity with which image succeeeds image, destabilizes the electorate’s perception of the candidates. For unified, coherent Renaissance representation it substitutes Cubist depiction of its subjects, a collage of glimpses built up over the course of the campaign, fluid and unfixed in the mind perhaps even at the moment the voter steps into the booth to cast the ballot. […]