It’s nothing personal. It don’t mean nothing. It’s just a photo contest thing. Those are the words I try to keep in the front of my mind every time contest season rolls around. I’ve been a pretty regular entrant in various photo contests since I got into this wacky professional way back when I needed to get a haircut every other week.

I’ve also been a judge for the NPPA Monthly Clip contest a time or two and I’ve watched the judging of Pictures of the Year International, either in person or online, whenever I’ve been able to manage it over the last several years. Ah, that special feeling of seeing the best image you’ve ever taken get voted out in what seems like 0.2 seconds, “Click, click, click, click; OUT.” Worse is when there is that long pause before the last click, when your heart swells with sudden hope, only to be crushed by the cold, mechanical voice of the POYi Robot.

That’s why I try to keep those words in my head when I’m watching the judging. It’s just those judge’s opinion. It isn’t an indictment of the photographer, or their work. Photography is subjective and contests are doubly so. There are so many different factors that the judges may or may not consider, the story’s subject, other stories that they’ve seen, the dynamic between the judges, the images themselves, etc., that it is a completely useless exercise to argue that there is a definitive, numerical order that the entries should be in. This isn’t a race where you can show that one runner finished ahead of the other.

That said what you can do is to try and divine what is going on in the heads of the judges. You can try to determine the why. Not to make a judgmental argument to assert your intellectual and artistic superiority but to better learn how photographs affect three to four very sophisticated viewers.  

I was present for several of the judging sessions over the two weeks of the still photo categories but was unable to take notes do to my volunteering during the competition. I’ll begin with some general observations from these sessions before delving into my thoughts on the Feature Photo Story: Reportage category which I watched undistracted, and in it’s entirety. First off there is the constant, yearly refrain of the problems of not editing tight enough. This is said every year, in every story category, over and over and over again. Few things can drill home the need to have a tight edit than watching the judging of a photojournalism contest. All it takes to sink a story, for any viewer, is one bad photo. Finally captions. If you don’t write good captions you better hope and pray that not one of the judges ask for it to be read because if they do it’s goodnight Gracie for you.

“After reading the lame caption,” Ken Geiger said regarding an image in Iran’s Children of Islam “so much for liking this further.”

My second observation comes not from the judges but from the entries themselves. There was a lot of repetition. I lost count how many stories there were on American politics, the refugee crisis and transgendered people. These were all major stories in the past year but as far as their photographic coverage most of the entries were almost exactly the same. You could take all of the images from all of the stories on those topics and mix them up and you wouldn’t be able to differentiate between most of the entries.

This is an important thing to bear in mind when looking for a story topic. How can I tell this differently? How can I inform my audience? This was particularly troubling regarding the numerous stories on transgender individuals and groups. Few of them showed many anything about who the subjects were as a person. Many of them seemed to concentrate on what set these people apart from the general public at the expense of showing what made them a part of society. This is the kind of angle one should look for when pursuing a story that has been extensively covered.

Observing the judging of Feature Photo Story: Reportage I quickly came to realise that the judges and I were fairly far apart as far as favorite stories go. What moved me and what moved them seemed to be very different things. They seemed to be more drawn to what I’d call essays and less to entries that had more of narrative structure. This could be a preference over essays or it could just be that the narrative stories just weren't bringing it. I will reiterate that this doesn’t matter in any way shape or form, again, just a contest thing.

I still love Chet Strange’s MPW story Half Empty, I’m totally biased, he’s a friend of mine, and I’ve been digging on Matt Slaby’s ongoing essay exploring the relicts of the Cold War, The Pasture of the Fourth Horseman. (I think it was his, the entry dealing with the subject didn’t advance so I’m not sure if it was Matt’s or someone working on the same topic.)

The only winning entry that really moved me was their first place, Iran Coming Out of the Shadows, by Newsha Tavakolian. It’s just so damn pretty. It was also the one story of the winners that felt more like a story to me.

“It feels more like a story to me,” Janet Jarman said. “I think this one is a very nice set of pictures and it flows and has a rhythm to it.”

I’m probably never going to Iran but I do think that there are aspects of this story that can be very applicable to a piece done on an area or a community rather than individuals. This is something that I want to improve upon with my own work. The images have a very distinct look and feel about them which enables them to flow together despite their different individual subjects.

I do have to disagree with the judges about Antonio Gibotta’s The New Addiction. I’m not going to argue that it didn’t deserve recognition, that’s their decision. I am going to say that I wanted to see more.

“The addiction story, it’s magnificent,” Matt Campbell said. “It’s a tough concept, how can you illustrate the social screen time? The subtlety, the face reflected in the stereo, every single picture works towards this message. This story is very important and  is growing as well. This hits on a lot of points, is well edited, well photographed. No repetition though it is a kind of thing that would be easy to have repetition.”

I agree with everything that Campbell said. The New Addiction does an excellent job of showing that there are people, particularly young people who spend an extreme amount of time staring at their personal electronics but it doesn’t say anything to me about how this is a problem. I want to see more. I feel like a story is something that is going to give me the who, what, when, where and why. This only gives me the what. Perhaps I’m being too literal and am expected to accept that the problem is implied but I’m a firm believer that our duty is to our audience, not ourselves, and we need to ensure that the point of any story is going to get across. That is something that I will keep in mind as I search for projects.

I got a lot of ideas from POYi this year, both for stories and approaches. I’d like to explore some of the Cold War relics here in Missouri and Kansas like Slaby has been doing. The old missile silos and even better to take it in a different direction and look at the people involved in addition to the communities. There was also a story about Coney Island in Winter that showed me some approaches to take, and not to take, with my idea about resort towns in the off season. That’s going on the back burner for awhile but that is an evergreen story that should provide a good way to kill some time and make some rectangles in the future.