In Spring 1944, the Missouri School of Journalism held its "First Annual Fifty-Print Exhibition" contest for newspaper photography, "to pay tribute to those press photographers and newspapers which, despite tremendous war-time difficulties, are doing a splendid job; to provide an opportunity for photographers of the nation to meet in open competition; and to compile and preserve...a collection of the best in current, home-front press pictures." (as quoted on the POYI web site.)
In 1948, when magazine photographers were also invited to take part it was renamed as the 'News Pictures of the Year Contest'. When in 1957 it was merged with the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) contest, there was another change of name, with it being simply known as 'Pictures of the Year'.
When the NPPA went its own way in 2001, the contest, again run solely by the Missouri School of Journalism, was renamed Pictures of the Year International (POYI). There is a Pictures of the Year International Foundation and the contest receives financial support from Fujifilm, MSNBC and National Geographic as well as the entrants and anonymous donors. As the name suggests, the entry for the competition is now increasingly from around the world, although particularly dominated in the newspapers and magazines by those from the USA.
As well as newspaper and magazine photojournalism, there are also awards for picture editing, with around 45 categories in all. In most of these there are awards for second and third place as well as the winner, and also often a number of 'awards of excellence', and in POYI63 there were a total of around 170 awards in all, although quite often the same work was awarded in two different categories. Most awards go to individuals, but some are for groups or publications.
At the top of the awards tree are the major honours for Newspaper Photographer of the Year, Magazine Photographer of the Year, the World Understanding Award, the Community Awareness Award, the Angus McDougall Overall Excellence in Editing Award (which, perhaps predictably, went to the New Orleans Times-Picayune) and the Best Use of Photography in Books Award. However to get any of the awards is a great achievement, as the overall standard of work is extremely high.
The work is selected each year by an extremely well qualified panel of judges, all highly respected in their particular areas of photographic expertise. Of course you may feel that they don't always get things quite right, and I've often thought that work which they placed second or third was even better than the winner. However, all of the work that reaches the final stage of the contest is of the highest order, and one of the minor problems I have with competitions such as this is that there is really no way to rank work at this level.
Virtually all of the pictures here make me look at my own work and feel inadequate. But they also make me determined to try harder, and give me fresh ideas and viewpoints to try. In a way the work that inspires me most is often not the kind of work that wins the major news prizes, usually dominated by the great events such as war, famine, earthquake and flood, but the pictures from everyday life, whether taken for a local or regional newspaper or as a project in the World Understanding or Community Awareness sections.
With so many winners and so much work on display, I can't mention everything, but suggest that this is a site that is worth returning to on a number of occasions and browsing through. POYIhas an incredible archive of work with more than 35,000 photographers selected in the years since 1944, and work from the last 9 or so years is currently viewable on line in the site archives, as well as lists of earlier winners.
Newspaper Photographer of the Year
Barbara Davidson of The Dallas Morning News has a great collection of images on line, making her an outstanding winner of this award. As well as 9 fine single images (a fine colour portrait of a Nigerian schoolgirl, a dynamic composition of a Biloxi family sorting through the wreckage of their Katrina-devastated home and other powerful images) there is a black and white essay on people affected by the Asian tsunami, some creative use of light in the coverage of the Pope's funeral, carefully composed square-format black and white images from 'The Ninth Ward' of flood-devastated New Orleans, and another strong black and white essay on Nigerian faith healers.
Todd Heisler of The Rocky Mountain News also has some great work, with a set of portraits of soldiers on their way to Iraq and pictures from there, as well as a story on those breaking the news of deaths to the families back home and some sensitively handled emotion-packed images of the return and funeral of a marine killed in Iraq.
Michael Macor of The San Francisco Chronicle also had great work related to both Katrina and Iraq, including a set of images on the return of a US soldier who had both legs blown off in an explosion in Iraq.
Magazine Photographer of the Year
While the Newspaper of the Year remains an essentially domestic contest (I'm not sure why this should be so) the Magazine Photographer is truly international. All three of the winners were freelances, and their portfolios contained much of the most outstanding work of the competition
I've written briefly before about Tamas Dezso, born in Budapest, Hungary in 1978, whose essays on Hungarian Horseracing and Young Upstarts were two of the highlights of last year's POYI. This year his work from Romania, Hungary and Bosnia is again superb and this time it has been awarded the recognition it deserves. Superb moody colour, and powerfully seen black and white images.
Marcus Bleasdale, a British freelance based in London, and winner of the Magazine Photographer of the Year award in 2005, has a powerful essay on street kids in Kinshasa, as well as work on the damage to people and ecology from the Chad-Cameroon oil pipeline and the war against the Maoists in Nepal.
Italian photographer Massimo Mastrorillo (b1961) showed work from his Indonesia 2005: Just Another Day (2005), at the Noorderlicht Photofestival in 2005 in 2005. His work from Mozambique shows the problems caused there by IMF / World Bank imposed economic restructuring. There is some fine black and white work both in this and the further essay on HIV in the country, with superb use of light and shadows and framing. His images from Albania and Poland are equally powerful, making excellent use of both square and panoramic formats in what is some of the best black and white work I've seen for quite a while.
