Pictures of the Year International (POYi) is a professional development program for visual journalists run on a non-profit basis by the Missouri School of Journalism's Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute. POYi began as an annual competition for photojournalism in 1944. POYi promotes the work of documentary photographers and magazine, newspaper, and freelance photojournalists. [1] [2]
POYi's projects have included the Pictures of the Year International Competition, an annual contest for documentary photographers and photojournalists; career-development symposiums and visual workshops for professionals and college students; Visions of Excellence, a series of exhibitions of award-winning photography; and the POYi Archive, comprising over 38,000 historic photographs.
The Pictures of the Year International Competition is for documentary photography, photojournalism, visual editing, and online multimedia. [3] Each year more than 52,000 works are submitted to the contest by photojournalists from 71 nation. During three weeks of judging, a panel of 17 visual journalists selects 240 winners. Category topics include news, sports and portraits. The three-week review is set in a public forum, with live webcasting. [4] [5] [6] [7]
POYi provides educational and career development symposiums for photojournalists, which include lectures, workshops, one-on-one mentoring and portfolio reviews. POYi has held seminars in cities including Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, New Orleans, Chicago and San Francisco. [8]
POYi develops exhibitions that are displayed in galleries, museums, libraries, and schools, entitled Visions of Excellence. POYi also creates themed exhibitions culled from the POYi Archive on topics such as the presidency of the United States, the Olympic Games, and African-American history. POYi exhibits have been displayed in the Newseum in Washington, D.C., [9] the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles, the International Photo Festival in Korea, the LOOK3 Charlottesville Festival of the Photograph in Virginia, [10] and the Louisiana State Museum for PhotoNOLA in New Orleans.
POYi at one time conducted an annual Emerging Vision Incentive program that provided $10,000 in funding for aspiring or early-career photojournalists to produce in-depth documentary projects that target a specific social issue.[ citation needed ]
In 2008, POYi and the University of Missouri's School of Information Science and Learning Technologies began a collaborative project to create a Web platform to host the digital archive of all the winning photographs in POYi's collection. The Archive was launched in September 2008 and uses the Omeka content management system. The POYi Archive contains more than 40,000 photographs. [11]
Pictures of the Year International began as a news photography contest in the spring of 1944 when University of Missouri professor Clifton C. Edom and his wife, Vi, founded the First Annual Fifty-Print Exhibition contest. Its stated purpose was "to pay tribute to those press photographers and newspapers which, despite tremendous war-time difficulties, are doing a splendid job; to provide an opportunity for photographers of the nation to meet in open competition; and to compile and preserve ... a collection of the best in current, home-front press pictures."
During that first year of the contest, 60 photographers entered 223 prints. In 1945 the Edoms also founded the College Photographer of the Year contest, and in 1949 they launched the Missouri Photo Workshop.
In 1948, following a decision to invite magazine photographers to participate, the Fifty-Print Exhibition Contest became the "ews Pictures of the Year Contest. Then, in 1957, the University of Missouri and the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) merged their respective contests. Through this partnership, Pictures of the Year continued until 2001 when NPPA and Missouri parted ways. POYi is now administered by the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism.
Guided by former directors Angus McDougall, Bill Kuykendall, and David Rees, the scope of Pictures of the Year changed dramatically between the 1970s and 2000. The number of entered images increased to tens of thousands, and in 2001 Pictures of the Year became an international program — Pictures of the Year International.
In 2006, POYi became a program of the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute and named Rick Shaw as its full-time director.
Photojournalism is journalism that uses images to tell a news story. It usually only refers to still images, but can also refer to video used in broadcast journalism. Photojournalism is distinguished from other close branches of photography by having a rigid ethical framework which demands an honest and impartial approach that tells a story in strictly journalistic terms. Photojournalists contribute to the news media, and help communities connect with one other. They must be well-informed and knowledgeable, and are able to deliver news in a creative manner that is both informative and entertaining.
Altaf Qadri is a Kashmiri photojournalist presently working with the Associated Press.
Clifton Cedric Edom, often credited with the title "Father of Photojournalism", was prolific in the development of photojournalism education.
Yannis Kontos is a Greek documentary photographer, professor of photography and commercial photographer. He has covered major events for over a decade in more than 50 countries. His work has been published in newspapers, magazines, and books.
Kuni Takahashi is a photojournalist.
Hossein Fatemi is an Iranian photojournalist. He received the 2nd place World Press Photo Award in 2017, and the Picture of the Year International (POYi) in 2016 and 2014 in two categories. He is a member of Panos Pictures since 2010.
Richard F. "Rick" Shaw is the director of Pictures of the Year International (POYi), a photojournalism program, and an educator in visual journalism at the Missouri School of Journalism. He is a former manager and senior editor at several daily newspapers in the United States.
Renée C. Byer (1958) was born in Yonkers, New York.
The Missouri Photo Workshop is an annual week-long photojournalism school based in Lee Hills Hall at the Missouri School of Journalism in Columbia, Missouri. Founded in 1949 by the "Father of Photojournalism" Cliff Edom along with American economist, federal government official, and photographer Roy Stryker and photographer Russell Lee, the workshop originally sought to instruct others in photojournalism based on the "gritty, content-rich photographs" produced by the pre-World War II (pre-1939) Farm Security Administration, a United States government effort during the Great Depression to combat American rural poverty. Following Edom's credo - "Show truth with a camera. Ideally truth is a matter of personal integrity. In no circumstances will a posed or faked photograph be tolerated." - each workshop originates in a different small town in Missouri, which is used as a backdrop for attendees from the United States and other countries to work on photograph storytelling methods such as research, observation, and timing. Missouri Photo Workshop faculty members have included the White House's first photo editor and NPPA Picture Editor of the Year Sandra Eisert and other prominent photojournalists.
Sandra Eisert is an American photojournalist, now an art director and picture editor. In 1974 she became the first White House picture editor. Later she was named Picture Editor of the Year by the National Press Photographers Association in its annual competition. She contributed to 1989 earthquake coverage that won a Pulitzer Prize for the San Jose Mercury News. As of 2012, she has her own business providing strategic planning for startups.
Paul Hansen is a Swedish journalistic photographer working for the newspaper Dagens Nyheter.
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Probal Rashid is a Bangladeshi documentary photographer and photojournalist based in Washington, D.C. He is a contributor photographer at Getty images. His work has appeared in several magazines and newspapers.
Barbara Davidson is a Pulitzer Prize and Emmy award winning photojournalist. She is currently a Guggenheim Fellow, 2019-2020, and is travelling the country in her car, with her two dogs, making 8x10 portraits of gun-shot survivors using an 8x10 film camera.
Mohammad Kheirkhah Zoyari, also known as Moe Zoyari, is an Iranian-American photographer. He has won three Pictures of the Year International Awards.
Justin Mott is an American photographer living in Vietnam. Mott specializes in wildlife photojournalism and conservation photography and is currently working on a long-term, self-funded project, Kindred Guardians, documenting people all over the world who dedicate their lives to helping animals. He was the resident professional photographer on Photo Face-Off, a reality TV show on History Channel for 5 seasons in which Mott competes against and judges amateur photographers throughout Southeast Asia.
Kim Komenich is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist, filmmaker and university professor.
Khandaker Muhammad Asad, known as K M Asad, is a Bangladeshi documentary photographer and photojournalist. He is currently a photojournalist at Zuma Press news agency and contributor photographer for Getty images.
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