The 2013 World Press Photo Winners

Two years ago, it was a haunting picture of an Afghan teenager who had had her ears and nose cut off. Last year it was a portrait of a Yemeni mother clutching her son in the style of La Pieta. This year, it's a dramatic burial march of two Palestinian toddlers. These are the 2013 World Press Photo Winners.

The World Press Photo Contest is an annual international competition that attracts photographers from different fields and backgrounds. The contest aims to encourage the highest standards of journalism, and provide a platform for the public to view the best documentary photographs for each year. This year the jury received 103,481 entries from 5,666 photographers of 124 different nationalities in order to find the best of the best.

The 2013 competition featured a few different categories from the previous years, with two winners per category, one for Story Entries (photo essays) and Single Entries. These categories are Contemporary Issues, Observed Portraits, Staged Portraits, Daily Life, Sports Action, General News, Sports Feature, Nature, and Spot News. A World Press Photo of the Year is also awarded to the best image from any category.

The award for 2013 World Press Photo of the Year went to Paul Hansen for his Gaza Image photograph (header image above) showing two young children who died from Israeli air strikes in the Palestinian Territories being prepared for their graves. Hansen also won the 1st prize in the singles section of the Spot News Category.

For Contemporary Issues, Maika Elan won 1st Prize Stories for "The Pink Choice" featuring gay and lesbian couples in the conservative society of Vietnam. Micah Albert won 1st prize singles for 1st Prize Singles for "At The Dandora Dump" showing a trash picker taking a break by reading a discarded book. In the Observed Portraits section, Ebrahim Noroozi took 1st Prize in Stories for "Victims of Forced Love", a story of an Iranian mother and son physically and emotionally scarred by an acid attack. Nemanja Pancic got the 1st Prize in Singles for "Little Survivor", a portrait of a newly orphaned young toddler.

In Staged Portraits, Stephan Vanfleteren earned the 1st Prize Stories for "People of Mercy", a series on Guinean people with different illnesses. Daniel Kaluuya won 1st Prize Singles for his portrait of actor Nadav Kander. In Daily Life, 1st Prize Stories went to Fausto Podavini for "Mirella", a 71-year old devoted wife to a husband stricken with Alzheimer's Disease. 1st Prize Singles was awarded to Daniel Rodrigues for "Football in Guinea-Bissau", a game being played on bare, dusty earth.

Sports Action 1st Prize Stories went to Roman Vondrous for "Cross Country Steeplechase", one of the most demanding races in the Czech Republic. 1st Prize Singles was earned by Wei Seng Chen for "Joy at the End of the Run", showing the final moment of a dangerous bull race. In General News, Alessio Romenzi got 1st Prize Stories for "Syria Under Siege", a photo story on how ordinary citizens are being affected by the current conflict in the country. Rodrigo Abd won 1st Prize Singles for "Aida", another victim in the syrian War.

For Sports Feature, 1st Prize went to Jan Grarup for "I Just Want to Dunk", documenting a group of young Somali women and their passion for basketball despite the dangers of civil unrest. For Nature, Paul Nicklen got the 1st Prize Stories for "Emperor Penguins", the curious group of birds living in the Antarctic. Christian Ziegler earned 1st Place Singles for "Southern Cassowary", a different kind of rare bird feeding of a fruit tree. In Spot News, 1st Prize Stories went to Bernat Armangue for "Gaza", a series looking back at the growing tensions between Israel and Palestine.

The full gallery of images from the 2013 World Press Photo Winners can be found on the World Press Photo website. For previous winners, have a look at the World Press Photo 2012 Winners, as well as Jodi Bieber and the Other Afghan Girl.

Damon Winter: Cinematic Photojournalism

This generation of photographers are the most competitive in any category. Whether it's in portraiture or landscape or photojournalism, photographers have to be more creative with the kinds of images they make. Most photographers are lucky to have one of their pictures published in a leading magazine or newspaper, but a few others seem to have the natural talent to get a different shot over and over again. Damon Winter shows he does it with his cinematic photojournalism.

Damon Winter is a commercial photographer specializing in portraits. He has shot for different publications, including the Los Angeles Times,  but is now more well known for his photographs for the New York Times. His celebrity portraits have a more dramatic and captivating style to them, a quality that is also found in his photojournalism.

In 2005, Winter was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography for his series on sexual abuse victims in remote Eskimo villages. He was also recognized for his work with the National Journalism Award for Photojournalism (PDF link).

Over the last decade, Winter has earned numerous accolades for his work. The photographer won two World Press Photo Awards, one in 2006 for his dramatic black-and-white portrait of Clint Eastwood, the other in 2007 for his landscape photograph of the Brooks Mountain Range in Alaska. In 2009, Winter finally won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature photography for his exceptional coverage of then Senator Barack Obama's first presidential campaign. His photographs on politics showed off an almost cinematic side to the campaign for the White House.

One of the more controversial awards Winter has received was the third place in the 2011 Photographer of the Year Awards for his entry, "A Grunt's Life" covering a platoon of soldiers embedded in Afghanistan. Winter only used an iPhone for his photographs, but the controversy came from his use of the Hipstamatic app which drastically altered the look of the images. Because of this "photo editing", some people won't consider his pictures as photojournalism, only simple photography. This intensified the debate for the definition of photojournalism, but there's no doubt that his pictures were a refreshing view of the ongoing American war in Afghanistan.

Winter's reportage photographs make viewers look twice as they have a movie-like quality to them, as if they were staged just so they were dramatic. Of course, as any good photojournalist will know, it's really a combination of great lighting, timing and positioning, along with conscious preparation beforehand. For Winter, it seems as if all of his documentary photographs happen to luck out on the best lighting, timing and position every time.

His portraits also have a very engaged quality to them, which makes it clear that Winter prepares his set to ensure that his subjects are comfortable before his camera. This is a philosophy he takes wherever he goes in order to get a different angle on things in order to "...look beyond the obvious, in a more subtle way."

This is Damon Winter's website. More cinematic photojournalism over on his New York Times blog. For another take on cinematic photography, have a look at Alex Prager.

Alexander Gronsky: Less Than One

Winter still dominates much of the northern hemisphere, so it's only fitting to feature more photographs on this subject. This special season only heightens the feeling of loneliness and the perception of endlessness with its foggy textures and white-gray hues, but what happens when these feelings and perceptions are presented in an area with less than one person per square kilometer? Alexander Gronksy tries to answer that question in his series, "Less Than One".

Alexander Gronsky has already been previously featured here for his series "The Edge", photographs that explore the meeting points of the urban and rural, civilization and nature, and everything that involves these boundaries. He focuses most of his energies into exploring old concepts and presenting them in a new format, especially with regards to subjects in Russia.

In his series, "Less than 1", Gronsky points his camera at the same subjects, but this time with the aim of documenting the areas in Russia with a population density of only one person per square kilometer. The photographer traveled to the countries outlying areas to see what life is like in such a sparse environment. The results might look like of his other projects, but the element of his purpose adds an additional dimension the photographs in this series.

The photos in this series were also taken during the making of Gronksy's other work, "The Edge". This previous project done in the cold months of winter on the outskirts of Moscow heightened the sense of loneliness and isolation of his subjects as well as provide a more minimalist view for the entire series. Gronksy also revisited several of these sites, as he took three years to complete this work beginning in 2006.

While many of these photographs lack a human subject, there is still a strong feeling of people, whether it's the sense of their awaited arrival, or the dread of their imminent departure. Scenes like a colorful playground without any children, a group of townspeople seeing off the lone ferry at their port, or simply the trash littered around the ground all point to a civilization that seems to be waiting for spring in order to start living again.

Even with the strong human element in his images, Gronsky sees himself more as a landscape photographer. This frame of mind only helps to emphasis the environment in his photographs as they add a strong foundation for his visual stories. Thus, Gronksy has been described as a photographer who belongs to the new generation of graphic documentary photographers.

Gronksy's series on these places in Russia have a strong sense of nostalgia, as if the old days of the Soviet Empire still reign, yet they also hint at a more hopeful future, when spring will come to wash away the gloom. For this beautiful collection showing what the world is like in a place with a population of only less than one, Gronsky received the Foam Paul Huf Award for 2010.

Alexander Gronsky's website is here. His previous series on "The Edge" can be found here. His published works can be found in the book, Contact Sheet 166: Pastoral. For more features on landscape photographers, check out these previous posts.

Alexander Gronsky: The Edge Of The World

The changing seasons have long provided inspiration for artists since man began creating art. Winter, while being one of the more somber seasons, provides plenty of material for storytellers. The themes of death, rebirth, beginning and end all play into this season, and its easy to see why. Photographer and artist Alexander Gronsky captures what the edge of the world looks like in his project, "The Edge".

Alexander Gronsky is a professional photographer who has worked for different advertising agencies and publications. Over the last few years, he has devoted his photography to his personal projects, leaning towards documenting the unique landscape and people of his adoptive home of Russia.

In his "Mountains & Waters" project, Gronsky looks at booming Chinese cities and how the landscape has changed with urban development. In his "Less Than One" series, the photographer travels to the most desolate places in Russia where the population density is less than one person per square kilometer. In his "Pastoral", Gronsky looks at the intersection of the urban and rural, areas that fit neither concrete definition. For this work,  Gronsky won the 3rd Prize in the Daily Life category of the World Press Photo 2012, one of the many prizes he has accrued to his name over the last decade.

In his project entitled, "The Edge", Gronsky explored the concepts of boundaries in reality, presented in an abstract manner. The photographer captured different scenes all around Moscow city, exploring the meeting points between the urban and the wild, industrial and residential, and all other points of convergence. Similar to Daniel Kukla's Mirror Landscapes, Gronsky presents how diverse a landscape can be, this time with added element of people.

In addition to the subject matter in his photographs, Gronsky heightens the feeling of isolation through the use of the nature of winter. The photographer had previously photographed the area during the warmer months of the year, but shooting these landscapes in winter gives the scene a "blank canvas" look ready to be filled by the subjects of Moscow. In the same way as Marek Samojeden uses the snow as neutral space, Gronsky  only needs a few subjects to give color to his minimalist photo artworks.

Gronsky also presents a different boundary present in all photographs: the photographic frame itself. These images only exist within the edges of the photographic paper, creating another boundary between reality and abstract.

While Gronsky's artistic statement about his photographs might get overly philosophical, there's no denying that he's managed to captured a magical world in the white blanket of winter. His project is aptly entitled, "The Edge", but his images are more about intersections: industrial and rural, old year and new year, winter and spring, and so on. It's wonderful to see how even the seeming edge of the world, while being overwhelmingly muted, can still still be vibrant with urban life.

This is Alexander Gronsky's website, with more images of the edge of the world and his other projects there. His portfolio, Contact Sheet 166: Pastoral, can be purchased here. For another view of edge landscapes, check out Daniel Kukla's Mirror Landscapes. For a different take on winter, have a look at Marek Samojeden's winter time in Poland.

Chuck Close: Daguerreotype Portrait of Kara Walker

A good portrait should reveal answers about the person, yet leave enough room for more questions. In some cases, the old ways become exciting methods for producing refreshing images and themes. A good example of this is Chuck Close's daguerreotype portrait of Kara Walker.

Chuck Close is one of the most prominent portrait artists of this generation. He is famed for his extremely large canvas paintings of people's faces, using varying grid and pixel methods to create smaller artworks in the larger portrait. Despite having prospagnosia (face blindness) and having suffered a seizure which left his arms and legs weakened, he continues to produce artworks on the same scale. Over the last decade, he has experimented with different forms of photography, with most of his famous photographs done with the daguerreotype process.

This particular portrait is a collaboration between Close and his artist friend Kara Walker, known for her work dealing with race, sexuality and identity. Walker poses in profile and is captured in silhouette, a more common form of portraiture in the 19th century. Close used daguerreotype photography, of the earliest photographic processes over a century old which involves long preparation, exposure and developing times.

The end result of these artists experimenting with old processes is a beautifully haunting profile portrait in the shadows, the outline of Walker's shoulders and head clearly visible, with the bare minimum amount of light showing enough detail on her face. For this 2007 portrait, Close was awarded the 2nd prize in the Portraits category of the World Press Photo.

For more on Chuck Close, check out this previous entry on him and his not so typical daguerreotypes. Time magazine has a good profile on Kara Walker. To find out more about the daguerreotype process, have a look at Louis Daguerre, the father of photography.

Omayra Sanchez: The Eyes Photographed by Frank Fournier

This haunting image shows 13 year old Omayra Sánchez neck-deep in flood water and debris caused by 1985 eruption of the Nevado del Ruiz volcano in Armero, Colombia. Her pasty-white shriveled hands and bloodshot eyes are the result of nearly 60 hours of exposure, having been trapped in the same position since the lahar and melted ice-cap water reached her town. She died a few hours after this image was taken.

The photograph was made by Frank Fournier, a photojournalist, and was almost immediately surrounded by controversy when it was published. Some criticized the photographer for acting like a vulture, preying on the victims with his camera, but Fournier defended his actions saying that he believed it was his duty to report on "the courage and the suffering and the dignity of the little girl". The image, titled the "Agony of Omayra Sánchez", won the World Press Photo in 1985, just one of the haunting images captured by Fournier that day and included in his entry for Spot News stories.

Wikipedia has a good entry about Omayra Sánchez and the photographed captured by Frank Fournier if you want to know more.

Tim Hetherington: The Face of War

When photography first developed into something portable, documenting the front lines became a reality and war photography became a reality. Nowadays, the world has become saturated with images of armed conflict, so much so that it's not uncommon to find people desensitized by the images. Still, war images have their place in photography, with the likes of Tim Hetherington showing the world the true face of war.

Tim Hetherington got his start in photography when he received £5,000 from his grandmother's will. He didn't use this money for photography equipment, but on travelling abroad; he went to China, India and Tibet learning about the different cultures there. The two years he spent in these countries changed his perspective on life and made him want to record the world that he saw.

He spent the next four years working at odd jobs in order to go to back to college, and spent a year learning photojournalism. He eventually got a job as a staff photographer for The Big Issue. Shorlty after, Hetherington spent much of his time in Liberia and Nigeria, covering the civil war engulfing the region.

In 2007, Hetherington began his series on Afghanistan, specifically in Korengal Valley which was said to be the most dangerous place in Afghanistan during that time. He spent his days with the men of the Second Platoon, Battle Company of the Second Battalion of the US 503rd Infantry Regiment. Hetherington made several trips to Outpost Restrepo together with other photojournalists.

In 2010, released the documentary film, "Restrepo", which depicted what life was like in the Afghan military outpost. It won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary in 2011.

During his lifetime, Hetherington's achievements did not go unnoticed. He won many awards, including the prestigious World Press Photo on different occasions. In 1999, he won the 2nd prize in the Sports stories category for his series on Liberian children using football to provide stability in their lives amidst the civil strife. In 2001, he won 1st prize in the Portraits series for his photographs of students in a Sierra Leone school for the blind. In 2007, he won twice; 2nd prize in the General News stories for his photographs of OP Restrepo (most of the images in this post), and the 2007 World Press Photo of the Year for an image of a soldier resting wearily in the Restrepo bunker (the header image above).

Sadly, Hetherington was killed while covering the Arab Spring uprising in Libya. Another photojournalist, Chris Hondros, also died when they were walking along the front-line together with rebel fighters. Hetherington covered war not because he loved it, but because he felt that he had the responsibility to show the rest of world the violence of armed conflict. His now immortal photographs are a continuing testament to his work.

The Late Tim Hetherington is remembered through his official website and his memorial site. Find the face of war in Tim Hetherington: Infidel, Long Story Bit by Bit: Liberia Retold, and Restrepo [Blu-ray].

The World Press Photo 2012 Winners

Last week, the winners of the prestigious World Press Photo awards for 2012 were announced. As with previous years, the international competition revealed the world, both often seen and unseen, in a series of exciting, devastating and thought-provoking images. The following is just a preview of the full gallery of winners of the World Press Photo 2012.

The World Press Photo is a non-profit organization well-known in the photography world for its annual competition in the field of photojournalism. Every year since 1955 the foundation has selected the best images in the fields of Arts and Entertainment, Contemporary Issues, Daily Life, General News, Nature, People in the News, Portraits, Sports and Spot News. The most outstanding photograph from all of these fields is awarded the distinction of World Press Photo of the Year.

The Reel Foto blog has already featured a few of the competition winners, from the striking portrait of Vladimir Putin by Platon (the 1st prize winner in the Portraits category in 2007) to a more somber but equally powerful one of Bibi Aisha by Jodi Bieber (the World Press Photo of the Year in 2011).

This year, 5,247 photographers submitted 101,254 pictures to the organization, with stories that ranged from different perspectives of the Arab Spring uprising in 2011 to a rugby match in Ireland to a portrait of a survivor of the 2011 Japan Earthquake.

The honor of the World Press Photo of the Year 2012 went to photojournalist Samual Aranda and his heart-wrenching photograph of a mother embracing her wounded son inside a field hospital in Yemen. The photograph (the cover photo of this post), taken on October 15, 2011, has already drawn comparisons to Michaelangelos' masterpiece sculpture, La Pietà. Even without the comparison, the image of a the quiet mother comforting her bloodied son is still worthy of recognition.

The World Press Photo is "committed to supporting and advancing high standards in photojournalism and documentary photography worldwide...[striving] to generate wide public interest in and appreciation for the work of photographers and for the free exchange of information.

Judging from the few images here, it's easy to see why the organization has succeeded for over 50 years, and no doubt the next 50 years will see the same quality of excellence in photojournalism.

The full gallery of World Press Photo Winners for 2012 can be viewed over here. You can also see the past years' winners from 2011 all the way back to 1955 in the archive section. The past years' images have also been collected in annual publications: World Press Photo 2011, World Press Photo 2010, World Press Photo 2009 and so on.