The Press Photographer's Year 2007 gallery presented

Thanks for the link, some really fantastic pics, and I am only on number 27 of 133.
 
The first 20 or so are war shots. It's not that I don't like war photos, it's just that it's too obvious tbh. Where's the sport shots?!
 
I thought that...Very war orientated (Didn't look through them all BTW), then I realised, it *is* the press photographers gallery, so likely to be what has dominated the press, and in this case war. :)
 
Try this... direct linky Clicky

First 40 are war related... some very good and graphic... shudder.
... letuces?
... have a look @ 57 :nuts:
... 62 is a beaut (not!)
... sporsts start at about 105 -> see 114!!

Overall there are some very very good images... :notworthy:
 
now when i brought this subject up on sportshooter.com i got shot down in flames big time!
But I dont see why anyone should win a prize for taking a photo of someone in grief after losing a loved one. Or even worse a photo of someone dead.
As far as photographic skills are concerned its not that hard to take a photo of a dead body! they dont even move!

On sportshooter.com i got shot down because i had a problem with one guy who had loads of photos from the london bus bombing. Last thing i wanted to see was a close up of the face of a disembowled woman. Something tells me her relatives wouldnt want to stumble across it either.
 
Well I agree with you there. The thing is, if you are a photographer lucky (?) enough to be posted to a war torn middle eastern city it is highly likely, regardless of your skill level, that you will return with some vivid and moving shots of asians in various forms trouble and grief. To my mind it's somewhat exploitive.
 
xynamic said:
On sportshooter.com i got shot down because i had a problem with one guy who had loads of photos from the london bus bombing. Last thing i wanted to see was a close up of the face of a disembowled woman. Something tells me her relatives wouldnt want to stumble across it either.
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I've been having similar discussions with my sister. I came to the conclusion that I don't know. Could I take that photo? Ethically I don't know if I should raise my camera at that point in time. However, people do and thats how we see how bad real events can be. A picture says 1000 words. One thing that I think a lot of photo-journalists say is that it happened, its true life. Its a public place and lots of others saw it. They document whats there. They have no power over what happened and it is a real shame when you see it, but by seeing it we can better appreciate the horror of these situations and learn not to repeat them (if thats at all possible).

Ultimately it comes down to why the photographer is shooting. In one docu I saw what looked like a group acting like paps shooting away, desperate to get that one cool shot of some poor women grief stricken at a funeral. That seemed wrong. If it was me I'd be shooting to document the event because it was there. People should see what can happen and if some good can come from showing the truth of terrorism or war then all the better. Hopefully I would be shooting for the right reasons, not to get cool photos or to make a mint selling them to the papers.
 
all i know is that if my family had just been killed and someone stuck an L series in my face, he would be in hospital the next day having a 1dMkiidectomy

i dont know if any of you are members of sportshooter, but my problem was that the top 10 in their monthly photo comp were always the same thing 'old lady looks on as house burns down', 'family of soldier grieve at his funeral' etc etc.
To give them some credit, a lot of the photographers did tell me they talked to the subjects at length before getting permission to take the shots
 
xynamic said:
all i know is that if my family had just been killed and someone stuck an L series in my face, he would be in hospital the next day having a 1dMkiidectomy
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Maybe thats why they're good photographers. They go places others don't because they feel people should see these things. Who doesn't slow down at a crash scene to check out the "story"? There is a certain fascination with these things. If you hear on the news about another bombing in Iraq, its just a guy in a suit saying "A bomb went off." If some photog runs to the scene and documents it so we can see the horror in our Monday morning paper on our comfy ride to work then it has more impact. We see real people crying, bleeding, and dead bodies. Live Aid was started due to the dramatic images of people dying of hunger in Africa. If it was just a report of hungry thin people it wouldn't have had the same effect.

If I was involved in a car crash and my family died and some guy was taking pictures I can't imagine what I would do. I've never been in that situation so I couldn't comment on my emotional state. From a calm perspective I would hope that I don't hit the guy.
 
As far as I'm concerned, documentary photography is the most powerful type of photography there is.

You can't get the same emotional impact, as you can from documenting a real life situation. Sure you can stage things, and documentary photographers have been riled in the past for staging some shots, but the fact of the matter is, they were there, they're opening YOUR eyes to what you would otherwise be blind to.

They chose to photograph a dying soldier instead of helping him. Is that ethical? Age old debate. They're there as an eye to the situations, not as an aid, otherwise they'd go as charity aid.

I personally welcome any picture that shows me a world outside my own fluffy, protected, local city. Because in reality, life is far more grim than we'd like to know, and for people to risk life and limb trying to show us that, I can't fault their ethics.
 
Nice link. Most are brilliant, some stunning some funny …one or two are just good though…super star shots don’t always mean their great, to me anyway.


If we didn't have photojournalists just think of what the modern world wouldn't know about, there's nothing quite like a photograph etc. ... Although its can be intrusive, its also necessary I feel.
 
but you could argue that the media in general paint an incorrect picture of the world outside the one we live in..

when i first moved to london i was suprised to find people not all rioting and killing each other.
ethiopia isnt full of starving people fending off flies
eastern europe isnt full of people all driving trabants and living in filthy squalor.
but if you read the papers and see the photos thats exactly what you are lead to believe

anyway.... i've completely taken this thread off topic, so we better end that there and get back on track :)
 
tis an interesting off topic branch the Gary, i wonder if arkady has any thoughts, he has been in iraw and afghanistan, some of his work has been on the front pages..
 
xynamic said:
but you could argue that the media in general paint an incorrect picture of the world outside the one we live in..

when i first moved to london i was suprised to find people not all rioting and killing each other.
ethiopia isnt full of starving people fending off flies
eastern europe isnt full of people all driving trabants and living in filthy squalor.
but if you read the papers and see the photos thats exactly what you are lead to believe
Click to expand...

IMO a large proportion of the press use sensationalism to sell their paper/program slot. They know that if they can get people worried about a subject then it's highly likely they'll keep watching their program or buying their paper for updates. They set the agenda of what the public debate, which is worrying, given their sometimes casual attitude to the facts. For most of them, getting the readers/viewers has been more important than reporting the bare facts for a very long time now.

Whilst I appreciate you may not see the social value of images of war they can actually serve a very strong purpose. They enable society to see the consequences. This doesn't mean that any war is either right or wrong, but it should be used to remind people of the sort of suffering that can happen as a result. This can obviously then be weighed up against the reason for going to war.

Many photographers feel that the purpose of an image is to evoke a response from the viewer and this doesn't always have to be a nice warm feeling. Images of suffering, whether human or animal can have just as much value in modern society as shots of soapstars and sports events and there is far more to capturing an image like that than just making sure it's in focus. I certainly don't know if I could do it. How many people remember the iconic image of a young Vietnamese girl running down a road with her skin hanging off after a napalm attack? That image shocked America and in particular middle America to it's core and undoubtedly played a role in changing society's attitude to the war.
 
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