The College Photographer of the Year competition judging presents the opportunity to learn a lot.
College Photographer of the Year (CPOY) judging concluded Saturday, Oct. 29 in Columbia, Missouri, at the University of Missouri – which happens to be my graduate school alma mater. Competition and grant application season is about to gear up.
CPOY is still the best competition for college-level visual storytellers to enter. It is good to see the competition expanding beyond pure photojournalism in the category structure and the type of work that is awarded. That reflects a change in the profession, changes that are for the better if your goal is to make a living from behind a camera. Consequently, students from art schools and non-jounalism programs are increasingly entering CPOY, which expands the visual vocabulary of the competition.
Jackie Bell directs the competition and you can sense her passion for students’ work and the desire to help judges reach and explain their best decisions by watching screencasts of the competition. https://cpoy.org/screencasts
When I was teaching visual storytelling courses at Syracuse University and directing The Alexia grants, I’d go through CPOY results and see what school programs were producing the greatest number of students who received awards. (I refuse to call them winners because that word is reductive, making it like a race or football game. Recipients or awardees are better words; saying those who earned awards is even better.) Being aware of stronger programs helped with outreach for The Alexia and it was good to see how Syracuse students faired over time - the program went from a smattering of awards to consistently being in the top three schools during my time there. Over a period of years, institutions being recognized would change and that might reflect changes in the programs. I’d also watch results the many years I was hiring photographers while leading visual staffs, to know who might be a good hire at some point.
Notice that I mentioned the number of students who received awards, not just the number of awards received as a way to gauge the strength of a program. Total number of awards and the number of students who receive awards are valid but one without the other is less telling. The more students who receive awards from a given school, the stronger that program is; as opposed to a given program having a star or two who is awarded heavily.
Another way to assess the results is how many top tier awards a program receives. Now that CPOY is calling its awards Gold, Finalist and Award of Excellence, it’s easier to break down – honestly, I don’t understand the classifications. Seems like the categorization is saying the one Gold recipient is the absolute best entry, one or more entries that receive finalist recognition are second best and one or more that receive awards of excellence are third best. That there can be multiple finalists and awards of excellence increases the number of awards and therefore diminishes the value of all but the Gold.
So I looked first at what school received the most Gold and Finalist awards. In the still categories RIT students received the most awards, nine; DocDocDoc school students received the second most with six. Danish School of Journalism and the University of Missouri at Columbia students received four awards each.
I didn’t know anything about DocDocDoc so asked a friend who does. It’s a private photography school in St. Petersburg, Russia. I couldn’t get the English translation of its site to work but here’s the link: https://www.docdocdoc.ru/#
Expand the count to all still awards, including awards of excellence and DocDocDoc received 13 to RIT’s 12, University of Missouri at Columbia’s eight and Danish Schools of Journalism’s seven. Hong Kong Baptist and Santa Monica College students received four awards each.
Notably absent from this group are students from Western Kentucky University, Ohio University and Syracuse University. (I stopped teaching at Syracuse in May of 2021 so had no role in teaching or helping students enter the competition this year.)
Add in motion awards and the Danish School received the overall third highest number of awards and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Syracuse University join those who received four awards – UNC all four for motion and Syracuse with two each, motion and still.
Judging panel personalities
Just looking at what schools won awards isn’t enough. To more completely understand the results look at who the judges are year to year and how their tastes and preferences affect who receives awards. If you don’t know judges, you can understand their preferences and reasoning by watching judging screencasts, looking at the judges’ web sites and who they work for and with, now and in the past. Jackie queries judges in each category, asking them to explain what they’re responding to and why.
In my experience, the range of experience, environments in which people have worked and types of work they’ve embraced increases the range of what they’re likely to respond to. Photographers as judges tend to respond to images that are similar to those they make and visual editors tend to respond to images like those that are chosen where they work. The greater range of work that either photographers or visual editors have experience with, the greater range they’ll respond to when judging.
Inevitably, a group of judges forms a personality, a set of preferences for the type of work they’ll award. Or there will be a majority that leans one way or another with outliers who occasionally succeed in swaying the panel - you can tell this is what’s happening when there are some selections that are different from the majority of those chosen. That’s the case this year.
Such variability among what is chosen is very different from what I thought for the first few years of being in this profession. I thought that there must be a universal good, better, best in photography and we were all striving to achieve that singular achievement. Now I think of types of imagery being on a spectrum from complex to simplistic, from informational to impressionistic, ideas to simply showing things happening and a myriad of other variables. Most judges will only respond to a given range of work within these spectra. This year’s panel’s choices tended toward right of the middle. Nothing avant-garde that pushed the edges of storytelling made it to the top and awarded work was seldom purely informational.
Spend time with screencasts of the semi-final rounds of the categories and you’ll see what was left behind. Assess whether you think there were gems not advanced or if there were consistent types of photos that were not chosen for the final round. I watched several semi-final rounds and saw photos that I thought were more dimensional but were not moved forward.
Inclusivity
It’s notable and significant that this year’s CPOY selections are more representative and inclusive of a wider swath of the world’s population and present a decent range of life on the planet. That is a significant change from the days when most judges were white men who brought similar experiences to their decision making.
Judges respond to specific types of work
My wife and I recently attended a dog show with someone who was showing two dogs. And I was surprised by the parallels between dog and photo competitions. Each breed of dog has a seemingly specific set of criteria by which the judge will determine which dogs “win”. Our friend could tell us how each judge was likely going to respond to the dogs in front of them, with great variability among the judges. So on the circuit, one dog would win with one judge but not another. Same for photography competitions. If you know who the judges are and what their tastes and preferences are, you can determine why the types of work were awarded.
The people who select judges determine what type of work is recognized year to year – Bill Kuykendall told us that when he directed Pictures Of The Year and we were grad students. The judge choosers will tend to choose judges of a similar ilk year to year. Only if they sway from their comfort zone in choosing judges will the type of work awarded vary or advance over the long term. Who chooses judges or a jury panel is also what produces variability competition to competition, equal to any other factor, I’d argue. When the chooser changes, what is recognized will likely change, to varying degrees. Look at how much change there was with a new director of World Press Photo. There’s a new director of The Alexia since my departure and things are changing there, too.
A valuable approach to selecting judges is to ask people for recommendations, people who are outside your normal circle. The goal is to bring in new voices who will widen perspectives of what types of images are chosen. Otherwise it’s a self perpetuating cycle, as with the Pulitzers – historically you had to have received one or been part of an organization that received a Pulitzer award in order to be a judge, creating a repetition in the type of work that would win. One challenge is that if you haven’t seen people judge a competition before, you can’t know what they’ll be like. They could be overbearing or overly narrow and didactic in their choices and how they discuss what they think should be awarded. So in asking others for names to consider it’s important to emphasize that their personality is as important a variable as their range of taste in photography.
The portrait category is telling in that judges can choose to award posed/controlled photos or photos of more spontaneous with a person as the primary focus.
Assessing what is chosen
As someone entering competitions, look at who judges for that competition have been in the past. Go to their sites and explore their work/experience and then compare that to what was awarded. Surprise, there will be consistency between the two.
How a set of judges responds to the portrait category reveals a lot. The choice is to award photos where the photographer controlled the setting to make the picture and photos that are made during the flow of someone’s life. Most portrait rules speak to conveying the personality of a person, which to my thinking could come from either approach. But judges who interpret “portrait” to mean the photographer controlled the setting will only recognize those types of pictures. Five of seven photos awarded this year were controlled portraits vs moments stopped in settings that reveal something of the person photographed. One of the almost-awarded photos showed a woman caring for several children and to my eye was a more compelling image than some of those chosen. Controlled vs. not is one of the most debated aspects of a category in competitions I’ve judged.
Here are a couple more variables to assess the work that is awarded: The topics or activities depicted in photos and how the photos were made. Pulitzers have tended to award images of conflict, post-conflict, world crisis or ill children but even in the big P there are exceptions. So it’s not a good idea to look at the subject matter that was awarded and think that if you address that topic, you’ll win an award. It’s most likely the opposite. But you can assess the creative aspects awarded photos, the choices that photographers made when creating photographs. Individual competitions and judges vary widely in the types of images they award. And it’s worth reiterating that it’s incredibly important that competitions and judges respond to a greater diversity of types of imagery, of what and who is pictured in photographs and how people are depicted. That is why a diverse panel of judges is so important – diversity in all its forms.
To begin creative considerations, I’ll start with composition: Gauge what percentage of the chosen photos have the main subject placed in the middle of the frame. In other words how much variability is there in the types of compositions chosen, that being an extension of how much photographs express. If composition is the culmination of many decisions, then defaulting to the middle is reductive. Of all the places where you could position the main element of a photo, the center is generally the least dimensional and the most challenging to make the rest of the frame work, to achieve what I call a full frame. Often with center-based compositions the frame is what I call an oval composition – you could draw an oval on the photo and what is outside the oval will not be important, or fully considered, the background will not be fully realized and there will be minimal foreground.
Also consider how well the photographers have seen light and color as an integral means of expression to say things about what they photographed. If light and color are not compelling, then the photographer was most likely making photographs that lean toward showing what was happening, as opposed to saying things about what happened. If the color of objects was not well seen your eye will first travel to places that are not where they should, photos won’t seem as dimensional and the mood of the setting won’t be as powerfully conveyed. If color temperature of a setting is not well seen there can be an odd feeling from the mismatched coloration, as opposed to emphasizing a quality through the different ways color temperature can render a setting.
Also consider how much variability there is in the distance and direction from which photographs are made. If both are similar throughout a set of photographs, chances are the photographer was saying the same thing about whatever was happening: it happened and here it is. As opposed creating a sense of what it felt like to be there or giving context to the happening, which comes from varying distances from which you make photos.
Because portfolios present the greatest range of work by a single person, what is chosen most reflects judges collective personality as a panel.
Here’s my impression of just the compositions in the portfolio category of CPOY, https://cpoy.org/winners-gallery/cpoy-77-winners/cpoy-77-portfolio
Gold recipient Vincent Alban’s photos are mostly oval compositions. Judge Gabrielle Lurie’s photos tend to be like this. Minh Connors award of excellence photos are a combination of oval and more dimensional photos, which is a mixture of what types of photos the judge’s are likely respond to. Some of AE awardee Ian Cherub’s photos are spatially geometric but many are single-plane images. (Spatial geometry is when photographs feel three dimensional, with elements at different depths within the frame visually connected on multiple planes with a determined hierarchy; single-plane photos are the opposite where only elements within one plane are visually connected, considered.) Elena Shcherbakova’s photos tend to be structured from the bottom up with a horizontal line splitting most of them, which is similar to how judge Jane Hahn composes photos, based on the photos on her site. Judge Brent Lewis, as an editor with experience in a greater range of settings and a good photographer as well, more likely responded to a greater range of compositional approaches and types of photographs than did Gabrielle and Jane. I don’t know Samantha Clark and can’t find representation of her choices other than the CPOY contest so won’t speak to her preferences.
How to improve the process
Inadequate judging processes can increase the likelihood of center-based, or simpler, photographs being selected. Judges get one shot at selecting the “best”, at a pretty fast pace as image after image pops up and is either in or out. Subsequently reviewing photos not selected as a backup is helpful. I know that I’ve pulled in many entries that were not advanced by other judges and those often received awards. A good study for a grad student would be to compare judging processes in a variety of competitions to see determine more effective approaches.
I overcame this inherent one-shot quality when directing The Alexia Grants by creating multiple waves of “judging”, first by asking a larger panel of reviewers to rate each entry on a 1-5 scale. They’d have many days to do this. Then I’d select a set of 20-25 finalists from their impressions that a panel of three judges would then review to choose grant recipients. The three-member panel truly would see the cream of what was entered and would have much more time to review and discuss the top tier than if they had to go through the hundreds of entries in the same amount of time. World Press Photo uses a similar approach.
How and what to enter
A lot of people throw up their hands and say winning competitions is a crap shoot. It’s really not, with the caveat that you do have to produce compelling work that is worth entering. Then it’s a matter of finding the competitions and grants that are more likely to be a match with your work. And you can tweak what and how you enter to more closely match what judges are likely to choose – not based on the topics that have been awarded but the quality of images. Sony is different from American Photo, POY is different from World Press but with some overlap and so on.
Helping photographers enter competitions is part of what I do now. Over the years, I’ve helped newspaper photographers with entries that received first and second photographer of the year recognition three times, magazine photographer of the year once and first and second place college photographer of the year while teaching at Syracuse. And people who worked at the papers where I was visual director have been recognized three times as picture editors of the year. Those are just the top of the pyramid of awards that I’ve helped people garner and don’t even include the many grants, books and gallery presentations. Yes, their work was powerful but there is as much craft and art in entering competitions and grants as there is in producing work.
Finding the right school
If you look at who is teaching at universities that regularly produce multiple students who earn recognition, examine the structure of courses and look at the work that students are producing. You’ll know whether that program is a match for you. Don’t just rely on a school’s reputation for past performance. Professors and programs change. It is who is standing in front of you as a student, the types of assignments they challenge you with, the type of photographs that they respond to, the structure/choice of courses and who will be sitting in the room with you that will determine whether you reach your potential. And receive awards.
My book about creating visual narratives and making a living
If you’ve read this far, let me conclude by telling you that the thoughts presented here are a smidge of what I present in my book, Creating Visual Narratives Through Photography, a fresh approach to making a living through photography. You can order the book or request an inspection or review copy here:
Thank you for spending your time here.