Competition and Consecration in the World Press Photo Awards

Notwithstanding the frequency with which it is said that a photograph is worth more than a thousand words, defining exactly how much it is worth remains a complex task. Evaluations and criteria change according to different subfields of practice and historical moments. The shifting character of photographic value is particularly evident today, due to the digitally disruptive turn that has been taking place for the last fifteen years, often generating controversies, augmenting uncertainties, and thus offering the occasion to assess degrees of institutional self-reflexivity – via competitions and awards. This chapter focuses on the World Press Photo, a non-profit organization which has been organizing the largest and arguably most prestigious press photo competition in the world since 1955, yearly awarding dozens of prizes (including the “World Press Photo of the Year”), which work as crucial institutional mechanisms of production and circulation of cultural value. Awards are relevant within such scarcely institutionalized fields as photojournalism, since they can raise fundamental value problems for juries, winners, and observers. It is the whole vision of the cultural field – its meanings, values, and indeed objects – which is at stake in prizing: competitions do not just reveal how news photographs are evaluated and how much they are valued, but also and most relevantly what a digital news photograph actually is – or at least what nowadays it is legitimately supposed to be. The chapter draws on an archive analysis of the last thirty years of the WPP awards; thirty in-depth interviews with WPP jurors and winning photojournalists; ethnography at major photo festivals and World Press Photo exhibitions.