IN THE 1930s, during the Great Depression, photographer Walker Evans, along with writer James Agee, traveled across the American Midwest, documenting the lives of impoverished sharecroppers. The result was the collaboration called Let Us Now Praise Famous Men which was both a paean and a dirge to the lives of the toiling masses. To this day, Evans' portraits of the families Fields, Burroughs, and others remain iconic images because of their sensitivity to and respect for their subjects. Apart from their inestimable worth as portraits, Evans' photography was a milestone for the medium.
Before finding its place as an artistic medium in its own right, photography had played poor cousin to the venerable art of painting and most of the earliest photographs had an air of being still-lifes. Save for a very few, all were studio shots, where the subject--whether flowers or people--had to pose long enough under controlled conditions. The usual result was a sepia kind of Sunday-best starchiness which could make it difficult to recognize even one's own mother. Evans' photographs were the polar opposite of starchy, and were of an almost heartbreaking immediacy. His subjects were not the posing kind and they faced the camera with nothing but the threadbare clothes on their backs and an undissimulating gaze for an unknown posterity.
Since the time of Evans, photojournalism has made huge leaps forward. Gone are the days when taking a picture, any picture, meant trudging about with camera, plates, tripod, and gunpowder flash, with each shot being a one-time-big-time affair. With the latest technology, it's no great shakes to take so many pictures per second even while parachuting off a building, as one advertisement for a point-and-shoot drolly demonstrates. Freed from the bulky considerations of yore, the photographer only has to be at the right time and the right place and ready to shoot The Moment.
Since its start in 1955, the annual World Press Photo Contest, reputed to be the world's most significant and prestigious platform for press photography, has given us the cream of the photojournalistic crop. Shown each year at about 85 venues in 40 countries, the exhibit features the year's top photo along with award-winning images from each of the ten contest categories including spot news, general news, people in the news, nature, contemporary issues, sports actions, sports features, daily life, portraits and arts and entertainment.
Last year's memorable winning image was one of supreme irony, captured by Spencer Platt of Getty Images, which showed a group of affluent young Lebanese driving in a red convertible through a devastated South Beirut neighborhood. This year's top photo, taken by Tim Hetherington for Vanity Fair, is more muted but no less striking. In an Afghanistan bunker, an American soldier rests, the expression of (shell)shock on his face as raw as that of Edvard Munch's "The Scream." It is an image of a split-second with the camera still slightly out of focus.
Another prize-winning image that came out in Newsweek earlier this year is by Brent Stirton and captures a slightly overhead and oblique shot of a huge mountain gorilla's corpse being evacuated from a preserve in the Eastern Congo. The accompanying article had been about a spate of gorilla-murders. With high-powered rifles, full-grown gorillas as well as nursing mothers and infants had been "executed" as if for sport, with their bodies left where they had fallen.
One image that might bring Evans' work to mind is a portrait by Rafal Milach which shows an old man standing on a carpet of baroque floral design and wearing a wreath and a pink tutu. The wall behind him is painted a sickly green and the rest of the shadowed room is bare save for a television set and the cropped legs and hands of another person sitting on a bed to the left. This infinitely forlorn image is taken from Disappearing Circus, Milach's series on retired circus performers from Poland. Another photograph that takes us to a different time and place is Vanessa Winship's portrait of two schoolgirls from the rural parts of Eastern Turkey. Although contemporary, this image has a vintage feel to it that comes not just from the girls' old-fashioned appearance but also from the photographer's choice of black and white.
Definitely not vintage is Platon's photograph for TIME Magazine which is a full-frontal close-up, nothing more nor less than an ID picture, of Russia's President Putin. It is an oddly disconcerting picture, with the subject's almost fearful symmetry and unnerving gaze, that one has to give the photographer credit for having had the nerve to come close enough to take it. Also straight out of the news is Roberto Schmidt's hip shot of political unrest in Kenya. Again, one fears for the photographer's safety but the question here is: How much should one risk for the money shot? These days, journalism is said to be one of the most dangerous occupations in the world. What more for a certain kind of photojournalism?
For the most part, the most recent winners of the World Press Photo Contest are disturbing, if not distressing, so much so that one expects the contest's nature category to provide a spot of relief. But this is not to be, and Paul Nicklen's photo of a narwhal sticking its head out of an ice floe shows, upon closer inspection, traces of blood. The caption informs us that the picture was taken to accompany a National Geographic article on narwhal hunting. In a way, the test of an image's impact is its ability to stand uncaptioned and all of this year's winners pass this test. Despite their often harsh reality, all of them have a beauty that goes beyond the facile--beyond the actual subject, in fact. They have no need for captions because they are images of our world, this world that each one of us shares, as of this second's writing, with 6,840,695,398 others. Along with the gorillas and narwhals. (Sofia Guillermo)