World Press Photo 2010

Overview

So I have a yearly routine with World Press Photo: See the show. Gape in wonder. Feel suddenly nauseous two hours later. If you've seen this annual collection of the preceding year's best global photojournalism before, you'll know what I'm getting at. The images featured are always stunning, and it's no different this year. There's an amazing stillness and beauty to every shot, often — almost always — of scenes that should surrender neither: the aftermath of the Iranian elections, Israel's bombing of Palestine, the workings of an abattoir.

But as those examples suggest, it's also wrenching viewing. News, arts, landscape and sports categories are all featured. But year-in, year-out there’s a predictable, and perhaps inevitable, skew towards impeccably shot horrors. Hence the nausea. It’s hard not to argue that anger or disgust are simplistic reactions. If you buy that the world-class photography should be celebrated, and that there’s no arbitrary point at which news photos should be disallowed, then World Press has to exist. But at the same time, they're reactions that are hard to shake when looking at a blown-up photo of the chair that a man (the President of Guinea-Bissau, as it happens) was shot then dismembered on and knowing that alongside everyone else in the room, you're there to be entertained.

So perhaps the real masterstroke here is the inclusion of the Sydney Morning Herald's Photos 1440 exhibit alongside World Press. The newspaper's shots run a gentler gamut — through beaches, festivals, the Sydney dust storm and Australian politics. Many are beautiful, too. But while they're not at the same level as World Press, it's not so much a virtuosity gap that separates the two shows; it's the difficulty of remembering any one of Photos 1440's individual images.

The horrors in World Press are so exquisitely presented and immediate as to force the formation of memories. And while it'd be nice to say that this ensures that the minority of simple, beautiful photos that don’t foreground death or cruelty — an autistic child under running water, their hand clutching a prized found object — also find lodging, that's bullshit. It just means there's something in the world's most beautiful atrocity exhibition that you won't be guaranteed anywhere else: your brain excited and alive.