Today we looked at an article from the New York Times about a photography competition showing how 20% of the participants were disqualified in the final part of this competition due to over processing their pictures. We read and analysed several people’s opinions from the article, including the jury chairwoman who is an assistant manager and director at The New York Times. The majority of this article is biased as the opinions are all from the competition officials. Although Lars Boering, the managing director of World Press Photo, was more on the fence than any of the competition officials. 

He found solutions on how to tackle any problems with the rules of the competition and stated that “When they have questions during the period they submit the work, a team is able to answer these questions” this shows that the photographers that were disqualified knew that over processing their image wasn't actually allowed, especially in photojournalism, because nothing should be cut, cropped out, or hidden as it could completely change the meaning behind the image. 

There was only one actual partaking photographer interviewed for this article and he was anonymous, showing that either he must've not been allowed to show his identity or he was too scared of the officials on their high horses as they seem to have a lot of power. He stated that it doesn’t matter what the photographers remove because they all work in a different ways. “As photojournalists or documentarians we aim to highlight life and tell stories, but we are all to do it in our own way.” is the exact quote. However I’m not entirely sure I would agree with him on this account as he is talking about photojournalism, an image that is used to tell a story, an honest story in which nothing should be hidden as people should know the truth because honesty is said to be the best policy.

In my opinion, the photographer does have a point - photography is an art form that we all form differently, so there shouldn’t be any disqualification based on art, however, there is a line to where you should stop editing out things, as sometimes it is best to leave things in so it lets people see the whole image and he meaning behind it. For example take the famous picture of the Vietnamese girl running down a street screaming because she was affected quite seriously by a napalm bomb. The original picture was actually cropped as it showed an american soldier walking besides her on the road just rolling a cigarette and not caring about her or the other children, and this told a completely different story. Overall I am in between opinions on this subject because both opinions are very valid.