Yesterday Roberto Rosales and I judged the photojournalism entries in the Wyoming Press Association’s yearly contest. The work we looked over was excellent, capturing the year in this western state very effectively. We saw celebration and grief, heartache and triumph, and beautiful slices of everyday life. It was a great experience to see the work.
As we approached each table covered with the entries from a specific category, we’d immediately start outing the photos that weren’t going to win. It’s a cruel, quick process. The cream rises to the top quickly and many photos are rapidly stacked in the discard pile. When I judged here before, back in 2004, the judging process was open and a group of at least twenty photographers followed us from table to table, observing the process. As we weeded out the weaker photos you could hear the gasps and moans as people saw their favorite work discarded quickly in a pretty cold fashion. Luckily no one tried to shiv me in the back.
Sometime in the last few years they decided to close the judging. One concern was that the audience might have influenced the judges. From my experience, the audience was pretty quiet and I never felt that, but the closed session was also productive. I think one benefit of the open judging was that the judging influenced the audience. And educated them. But we pulled a bunch of photos from the discard pile to talk about in tomorrow’s roundtable discussion.
One thing we talked about as we eliminated great photographs yesterday was this basic fact about photo contests: You can be a great photographer and not win. The winners in a contest are great photos that also have something special about them, a little bit of magic or a bunch of good luck, or something you never would have expected when you triggered the shutter.
And this is something that we can’t say enough to the photographers who will look in vain for their names on the winners’ list posted in the hallway of the hotel— Many of the photos we eliminated yesterday would have made any editor happy. But when it comes to contest time, we’re looking for the absolute best of the entire year. Look over this year’s winners and see what you can learn from them, then apply it to some hard work in 2009.
