Pictures of the Year Multimedia Categories

Since I was only able to make it for a few hours here and there of each multimedia category in POYi this year, I decided to watch through the winners in each area and look for common themes and techniques they share to see if I could determine what the judges based their final decisions on.

Right away I was struck by the fact that only a couple of photographers swept the awards this year. In the feature category, Chang W. Lee of the New York Times and Liz O. Baylen of the LA Times both won two awards, 2nd and 3rd, respectively, with an award of excellence thrown in for each of them as well. In Baylen’s case, both stories share many stylistic elements as well as broader themes like the inevitability of death and the transcendence of racial boundaries. Lee’s stories, part of a series called Second Chance, document people who are going through difficult transitions or facing big changes in their lives. His 2nd place profile of an artist with stomach cancer is moving, but in my opinion his award of excellence winning story on a man about to undergo a sex change is the stronger work.

In the news category, David Gilkey of NPR also won two awards, both for stories about Afghanistan. His story “America’s Battalion” won 3rd and “Lucky Dustoff” got an award of excellence. The first place winner, a story about tobacco cutting in Kentuckc called Cutting Through the Competition, was the only one in the category that wasn’t about Afghanistan, and it was refreshing to see a non-war related piece win in the news category. Of course the war is important news, but after a while all the photos and media coming out of a war zone begin to look much the same. In this case it seems like the judges were rewarding the audio as much as the photos, which would certainly give the NPR team an advantage with their years of experience in creating compelling audio stories.

In the Issue Reporting category Liz O. Baylen makes another two appearances, winning 1st and 3rd for stories on a boy who was molested in kindergarten and a former nurse who became a quadriplegic after an accidental drug overdose. In both stories, just like her award winning feature pieces, she uses many photographs with out of focus foreground elements and exotic framing devices. She also does an excellent job choosing details that illustrate her themes simply and effectively. It seemed like the judges really responded to her stylistic choices, and the stories themselves were moving and powerful simply for their subject matter. Baylen does a terrific job selecting good stories, and she treats her subject with humanity and dignity that is refreshing to see. Most surprisingly, perhaps, she was able to shoot the entire sex abuse story without once identifying the boy or showing more than a piece of his face. It must have been incredibly challenging to make those photos work together without the unifying thread of a face to link them, but she seems to do it almost effortlessly.



Here are the links to the winners' galleries:

Feature
News
Issue Reporting