World Press Photo: Selection Process

Rebecca Brayton: The World Press Photo competition receives tens of thousands of entries and these have to be willed down to a small a selected few. Hi I’m Rebecca Brayton and welcome to watchmojo.com and today, we’re speaking with jury member Erin Elder to learn more about the selection process and we’ll be seeing some of the year’s best photos.

So why don’t you tell us about the jury of World Press Photo. Who is choosing the years best photos?

Erin Elder: I believe there are about 14 members and they come from all over the world and from different disciplines within photography.

Rebecca Brayton: As a jury member can you tell us more about the selection process?

Erin Elder: There are five rounds. So the initial round I believe that they saw 96,000 plus images. The judging was done anonymously, so I don’t know how the people sitting beside me or the people that are on the other side of the room have voted.

Rebecca Brayton: What are you looking for?

Erin Elder: We’re looking for images that provoke our curiosity. That’s asks us to become emotionally involve.

Rebecca Brayton: Would you like to show us some of your choices in the World Press Photo exhibit?

Erin Elder: Absolutely.

We’re standing in front of the first-prize winner for the sports feature. It was taken by a Chinese photographer name Zhao Qing. It was a very fresh approach that took the sport and put it in a context of the urban environment and really you know how everyday individuals might view the Olympics.

This is a body of work by an American photographer named Brenda Ann Kenneally. It’s a portrait of a family in Troy in America. We’ve really felt that there was a very strong focus to the story that the photographer communicated her point very well. There was visual consistency to the story. The quality of the imagery was unsurpassed by any of the others.

This is another remarkable image taken in Brazil by Eraldo Peres with the Associated Press. Your first impression of the image is a group of young people hanging out on the street and then the more you look at the image, the more time that you spend, you realize that there’s a dead body there. The country and the scene and the situation may seem to be very far away makes you stop and ask questions about the world in which they live and then hopefully will pop some discussion or examination about the society in which we live.