Everybody loves photographic competitions, dont they? Photographers love winning them. They quite understandably enjoy the recognition; the acknowledgement that in a competitive business, they were judged by a jury of their peers to be the best of them.
Any process which promotes excellence and positively raises the profile of the team and the brand is welcomed and we bask in their reflected glory. Their winning entries acquire a second lease on life, sometimes reaching a far wider audience than the first time round and serve as an inspiration to aspiring and established photographers alike.
On the other hand, as anyone who works in a team of news photographers will know, competitions are a double edged sword which can cut both ways.
The urge to improve ones circumstances is part of human nature but there are few things more effective than winning a competition for sowing the seeds of disaffection. Overnight an individual prepared to stand in the pouring rain for hours waiting with the rest of the pack for some errant politician can find themselves rather above this kind of work and no longer able to shoot in colour.
Self-belief is important in this trade but in some extreme cases winning a top award can extinguish any element of self-doubt completely and those afflicted are best avoided as travelling companions on long journeys for the duration.
Others suffer from incapacitating doubt that they will ever shoot anything as good as the pictures they won with and fear that everyone is watching them, which of course they are because where too there is praise there will also be criticism. The bigger the prize, the louder the accusations of bias, or cheating with set up pictures or excessive use of PhotoShop and of course the put downs, my personal favourite of which is, I had it better but didnt enter.
In truth every day is a competition. The prizes are the fronts and double pages of the worlds great newspapers and magazines, the backdrop to the TV news and tens of thousands of hits online.
I have always subscribed to the old wire service adage, you are only as good as your last picture, but then Ive never won a photographic competition. These guys have and you can see why.
Arko Datta won World Press Photo 2004 with this picture of an Indian woman mourning the death of a relative killed in the Asian tsunami catastrophe.
Akintunde Akinleye won first prize in 2007 World Press Photo Spot News (Singles) for this picture of a man washing soot from his face at the scene of a gas pipeline explosion near Lagos.
Finbarr O’Reilly, a Reuters photographer based in Senegal, won the World Press Photo of the Year 2005 with this picture of a mother and child at an emergency feeding centre in Tahoua, Niger.
