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As previously mentioned<\/a>, on April 16, 2000 I delivered the keynote address to the World Press Photo Awards Days gathering in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Organized by the World Press Photo Foundation, this is\u00a0an annual celebration of documentary, photojournalism, and press photography held in the Dutch capital, where World Press Photo<\/a> \u2014 henceforth WPP \u2014 was founded in 1955.\u00a0WPP\u2019s Awards Days program, which includes the premiere of that year\u2019s annual exhibition,\u00a0brings together professionals in the field of information-based imagery: photographers, of course, but also picture editors, periodical and book publishers, directors of picture agencies, representatives of various photo-industry companies (Kodak, Nikon, etc.), and others.<\/em><\/p>\n Though I’d seen, and sometimes reviewed, previous editions of the WPP annual exhibition, that Amsterdam visit marked the first time I’d had the opportunity to\u00a0see the show installed under its creators’ complete control, the way they wanted it seen, not adjusted to the exigencies of other presentational spaces on its subsequent tour. A few days thereafter, on April 19, 2000, I wrote the following email to\u00a0\u00c1rp\u00e1d Gerecsey, then the director of the\u00a0World Press Photo Foundation. Seeing an installation of the 2011 edition of\u00a0the World Press Photo exhibition at Mesiac Fotografie (Month of Photography)\u00a0in Bratislava<\/a> last week \u2014 where I’d spent time with several earlier editions of the WPP show in 1998 \u2014 reminded me that nothing much had changed 11 years on, so this commentary still pertains. \u2014 A. D. C., Paris, France.<\/em><\/p>\n \u2022<\/p>\n Dear \u00c1rp\u00e1d:<\/p>\n World Press Photo Awards Days, Amsterdam, 2000. Photograph \u00a9 2000 by World Press Photo Foundation.<\/p><\/div>\n Pursuant to our discussions over dinner on the 14th and other quiet moments, I’m putting down here some of my thoughts about the future of the World Press Photo Awards, especially in regard to its impact on the public via the exhibition and book. Please consider this an open letter that you’re welcome to circulate among your colleagues for discussion.<\/p>\n Let me bite the hand that’s just fed me so well by asking a question that’s nagged at me for years: Why do the World Press Photo annual exhibitions all look exactly the same?<\/p>\n This cookie-cutter aspect of your yearly surveys struck me most forcibly during a November 1998 visit to the Slovak Republic, where I’d gone to participate in the Month of Photography organized by Fotofo in Bratislava. They’d imported several editions of the WPP Awards show, and as I moved between them I found that I couldn’t tell one from the other.<\/p>\n I realize, of course, that this is not entirely the fault of the photographers involved. Like any communications system, the corporate structure through which photo-reportage reaches the public encourages the transmission of certain kinds of data and impedes the flow of other sorts. And photojournalists and press photographers have far too little say in that process.<\/p>\n World Press Photo exhibition catalog cover, 2011. Portrait of\u00a0Afghan female Bibi Aisha by Jodi Bieber.<\/p><\/div>\n Nonetheless, looking at these two surveys back to back, it seemed obvious that, for the world as seen by World Press Photo, the major events of each year were natural catastrophes like earthquakes, man-made calamities like train wrecks and oil spills, people slaughtering each other over lunatic ancient feuds, poor people dying like flies, technological innovations, sporting competitions, and the public activities of figures from the world of entertainment. It would have been easy to conclude that these events simply rotate around the world according to some obscure distribution method: this year India gets the earthquake, next year they’re the cutting edge of computer programming. And it would have been equally easy to conclude that the photographers who covered these stories \u2014 virtually indistinguishable from each other on any stylistic basis, at least in the context of this show \u2014 received those assignments according to some equally mysterious and perhaps absolutely random process.<\/p>\n Line up your annual catalogues for these shows, cover up the dates and names and captions, and I’m willing to bet that few people \u2014 even among your colleagues in the field \u2014 could tell you who made most of the photographs, in what year, and in what country. They all look like stock shots to me \u2014 even when I know the often distinctive larger projects and bodies of work from which they’ve been extracted, produced by photographers who do indeed have an individual vision and a personal voice and the hard-won ability to present a coherent, investigative analysis of a complex social situation. Everything looks homogenized and decontextualized, freeze-dried and reconstituted, and terminally clich\u00e9d. When I was reviewing for the New York Observer<\/em> and other publications from 1988 through 1997, I rarely wrote about the WPP shows; what was there to say?<\/p>\n A woman views the World Press Photo of the Year at Caixa Cultural, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, spring 2011. Photo by MC2\/Flickr Creative Commons License.<\/p><\/div>\n Of course, the same holds true for the relentlessly banal shows and books that Big Champagne [Magnum Photos]\u00a0has churned out over the past decade: marginally thematic but otherwise senseless hodge-podges, pointless grab-bags of individual images that treat Big Champagne as little more than a stock agency \u2014 exhibitions and publications generated with the majority approval of Big Champagne’s membership, representing a collective specifically founded so that its members could tell stories at length and control their presentation. If we can’t look to such an organization to hold the line, where do I get off asking anyone else to fight the good fight?<\/p>\n I’m not sure if anyone today expects press photography generally, or particular stories told in that form, to change the world; I certainly don’t. At the same time, because we become what we behold, I don’t think that anyone in the field doubts that press photography is a process of perception management, and thus shapes the world in important ways. Much of the decision-making is of course in the hands of management and capital. However, I find it hard to believe that photojournalists and their agencies and their editors are entirely hapless pawns in the hands of witless and\/or malevolent but all-powerful publishing cartels. So it seems to me that if writers can challenge the publishing industry and win, as we’ve just done in the States\u00a0[here I was referring to the then-recent Tasini v. New York Times<\/a> case], photographers can do the same thing, and perhaps aren’t taking up that gauntlet often enough.<\/p>\n And it doesn’t seem at all unreasonable to me to propose that you consider changing what it certainly is within your scope to affect: the way that World Press Photo presents the results of its annual awards to the public, and creates its publication of record thereof.<\/p>\n The 2011 World Press Photo traveling exhibit on display at Caixa Cultural, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, spring 2011. Photo by MC2\/Flickr Creative Commons License.<\/p><\/div>\n I realize that many people have sweated, risked life and limb, in some cases even died to make these images; and others, present today and absent, have gone to great lengths and taken other risks to get them into print and on the public record. Nothing I’ve said comes from anything but the deepest respect for those commitments; and none of these comments is meant to tarnish in the slightest the well-earned peer recognition of individual achievement that the awards themselves represent.<\/p>\n What I’m saying is that I don’t think that those of you involved with the WPP Awards project do yourselves and your field full justice with these exhibitions and publications. I don’t think you honor yourselves appropriately with them. I think you see them from your insider’s perspective, your knowledge of the work and professional lives of the photographers and picture editors involved and the agencies and publications that sponsor and disseminate their work. You peruse it as an annual family album of your professional sphere, in other words. And this blinds you to the way that the presentation speaks to the outside world, to the average intelligent viewer who comes to these exhibitions and their catalogues and finds in each and every one an incoherent jumble with no clearly stated premises for the selection thereof.<\/p>\n![\"World](\"http:\/\/74.220.207.133\/~nearbyca\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/06\/WPP_logo3.gif\" "\\"WPP_logo\\""){kind=logo}
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