World Press Photo 2012

Overview

The media critic Charlie Brooker recently wrote a column about the aesthetic convergence of television news and bigger-budget movies, as fancy consumer cameras become the de rigeur news-gathering gear for photojournalists. Writing about the packaging of the recent Egyptian revolution in shallow depth of field cinematic shots, he wrote “the end result was that it resembled a sleek advert framing the Arab Spring as a lifestyle choice. I kept expecting it to cut to a Pepsi Max pack shot.”

In truth, that’s nothing especially new. The World Press Photo photojournalism awards, in particular, have skirted that line for a long time; celebrating the the most exquisite framing of the previous year’s global atrocities since 1955. It often makes for a stomach-churning exhibit, as World Press presents wrenching and bloody images of world conflict with a concurrent eye for beauty and composition that comes uncomfortably close to rendering them as entertainment. But it’s a testament to the show’s curation that it rarely crosses over wholly into exploitation.

Winning images are often so uncomfortably close to both the horrific events they portray, and an awful sort of humanity, that they can bypass the viewer’s media filter and register as an actual thing that’s happened. A part of our lives, and something that informs what it means to be human. Together with categories for photographs that can live up hackneyed phrases like “life affirming,” that has generally made World Press a sort of awful must-see. An exhibition of both the good and bad extremes of what being alive can be.

Which makes it a rude shock that the focus on humanity is almost entirely absent in this year’s exhibit, which is exactly the sort of hollywood-inflected packaging of conflict and disaster that Brooker alludes to in his Arab Spring gag. Where previous year’s shows have gotten so close to subjects that it’s impossible not register their humanity, almost all of this year’s “winning” shots are emotionally, and physically, distant.

The most telling examples of how emotionally bankrupt World Press 2012 is are two particularly empty contributions: Guillaume Herbaut’s tits-out shot of Inna Shevchenko, is the sort of smirking acknowledgement of Femen that belongs in Zoo weekly, while a series of photos of the Utøya massacre in Norway focus on circling helicopters and corpses photographed from a distance of safety.

There’s a focus on guns and destruction this year that’s adolescent in its attention to detail, while the choice of images overall feels more informed by a desire to cater to fans of various iterations of CSI than any real interest in world events. No less than three images ape Eddie Adam’s infamous 1968 Viet Cong execution photo, albeit with a fetishistic focus on the hardware involved, while an over-the shoulder shot of Muamar Gaddafi’s laid-out corpse is completely pointless except as a rubber-necking curiousity. Images of the Japanese tsumani, meanwhile, largely favour the physical wreckage of that disaster over images of the human toll, though — to be fair — David Guttenfelder's jaw-dropping series of images does cover that side of the tragedy.

NB: Many of the images linked to depict real world events that may be NSFW and/or distressing.