Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

HOW THE WORLD LOOKS TO US

2007; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 1; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/17512780601078886

1751-2794

Keith Greenwood, C. Zoe Smith,

Rhetoric and Communication Studies

Abstract An analysis of award-winning photographs of international events from the annual Pictures of the Year competition is compared to a similar study of Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs. The analysis concludes that the award-winning photographs, which represent the best of photojournalism, portray international events through a limited number of themes that reinforce a stereotype of developing nations as violent and conflict-torn places. Keywords: developing countriesinternational photojournalismPictures of the Year competitionPulitzersviolence Notes 1. The POYi archive, for example, contains more than 400 entries for judges over the span of the competition. Competition founder Cliff Edom also served as a judge in seven years. No other judge has served in more than three years, with one exception who served four years. 2. However, no less than 75 percent of the winning international entries were verified to have been published either before or after winning an award, though the total is undoubtedly higher. Former POYi director David Rees says some re-editing may occur in the photo story categories to create "a visual narrative rather than a selection of photographs that are selected to match a body of text" (personal e-mail to K. Greenwood, 2006). Winning photographs also have been included in post-contest publications featuring the winning images, including the University of Missouri's bulletin of winning images for the first few years of the competition. Former POY director Angus MacDougall recalls (in an interview by K. Greenwood, Columbia, MO, 2004) Encyclopaedia Britannica, a co-sponsor of POY from 1948 to 1956, included award-winning photographs in some of the yearly updates, as did the World Book Encyclopedia. The Best of Photojournalism books published between 1976 and 2002 also featured winning images (National Press Photographers Association, 2002). 3. The data set was created by retrieving photographs from the electronic archive of the POYi competition. The database allows for searching for specific types of photographs and immediate inspection of a digital version of the image to determine whether it fits within the search criteria. To match the Pulitzer selection parameters closely, only photographs that won first-place awards in the newspaper division of POYi are selected. Photographs published in newspapers or that represented non-Pulitzer categories such as sports, illustration, fashion, food, portrait and pictorial are excluded. Images from Photographer of the Year portfolios also are entered in individual POYi categories, so those portfolios are excluded as well. The remaining photographs are reviewed to identify international photographs credited to US publications. The final data set includes 43 individual international photographs and 25 international picture stories, which are judged in the POYi competition as a single entry. One first-place award is made for the entire picture story. In this study stories are considered as single units, resulting in a total of 68 items to be coded. 4. Kim and Smith analyzed Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs from 1942 to 2002. This study analyzes POYi winning photographs from 1943 to 2003. 5. The categories and definitions are as follows: (1) War/coup; (2) Poverty/social problems; (3) Demonstration/protest; (4) Crime/terrorism; (5) Accidents; (6) Natural disaster/weather; (7) Racial/ethnic problem; (8) Sports (the POYi competition includes a category for sports photographs; in the Pulitzer competition, sports photographs would be judged as news or feature photographs, therefore, the POYi sports categories are excluded from this analysis; sports photographs or stories that are judged as news or feature entries are kept in the data set); (9) Prominent person; (10) Human interest/oddities. The geographic locations are Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Africa, Middle East, Asia, Southeast Asia, South Pacific/Australia and Latin America. 6. To be valid, a chi-square analysis requires fewer than 20 percent of the cells to have an expected count of less than five. In this study, more than 98 percent of the cells had an expected count of less than five.