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Two years ago, it was a haunting picture of an Afghan teenager who had had her ears and nose cut off. Last year it was a portrait of a Yemeni mother clutching her son in the style of La Pieta. This year, it's a dramatic burial march of two Palestinian toddlers. These are the 2013 World Press Photo Winners.


The World Press Photo Contest is an annual international competition that attracts photographers from different fields and backgrounds. The contest aims to encourage the highest standards of journalism, and provide a platform for the public to view the best documentary photographs for each year. This year the jury received 103,481 entries from 5,666 photographers of 124 different nationalities in order to find the best of the best.

The 2013 competition featured a few different categories from the previous years, with two winners per category, one for Story Entries (photo essays) and Single Entries. These categories are Contemporary Issues, Observed Portraits, Staged Portraits, Daily Life, Sports Action, General News, Sports Feature, Nature, and Spot News. A World Press Photo of the Year is also awarded to the best image from any category.


The award for 2013 World Press Photo of the Year went to Paul Hansen for his Gaza Image photograph (header image above) showing two young children who died from Israeli air strikes in the Palestinian Territories being prepared for their graves. Hansen also won the 1st prize in the singles section of the Spot News Category.

For Contemporary Issues, Maika Elan won 1st Prize Stories for "The Pink Choice" featuring gay and lesbian couples in the conservative society of Vietnam. Micah Albert won 1st prize singles for 1st Prize Singles for "At The Dandora Dump" showing a trash picker taking a break by reading a discarded book. In the Observed Portraits section, Ebrahim Noroozi took 1st Prize in Stories for "Victims of Forced Love", a story of an Iranian mother and son physically and emotionally scarred by an acid attack. Nemanja Pancic got the 1st Prize in Singles for "Little Survivor", a portrait of a newly orphaned young toddler.

In Staged Portraits, Stephan Vanfleteren earned the 1st Prize Stories for "People of Mercy", a series on Guinean people with different illnesses. Daniel Kaluuya won 1st Prize Singles for his portrait of actor Nadav Kander. In Daily Life, 1st Prize Stories went to Fausto Podavini for "Mirella", a 71-year old devoted wife to a husband stricken with Alzheimer's Disease. 1st Prize Singles was awarded to Daniel Rodrigues for "Football in Guinea-Bissau", a game being played on bare, dusty earth.


Sports Action 1st Prize Stories went to Roman Vondrous for "Cross Country Steeplechase", one of the most demanding races in the Czech Republic. 1st Prize Singles was earned by Wei Seng Chen for "Joy at the End of the Run", showing the final moment of a dangerous bull race. In General News, Alessio Romenzi got 1st Prize Stories for "Syria Under Siege", a photo story on how ordinary citizens are being affected by the current conflict in the country. Rodrigo Abd won 1st Prize Singles for "Aida", another victim in the syrian War.

For Sports Feature, 1st Prize went to Jan Grarup for "I Just Want to Dunk", documenting a group of young Somali women and their passion for basketball despite the dangers of civil unrest. For Nature, Paul Nicklen got the 1st Prize Stories for "Emperor Penguins", the curious group of birds living in the Antarctic. Christian Ziegler earned 1st Place Singles for "Southern Cassowary", a different kind of rare bird feeding of a fruit tree. In Spot News, 1st Prize Stories went to Bernat Armangue for "Gaza", a series looking back at the growing tensions between Israel and Palestine.


The full gallery of images from the 2013 World Press Photo Winners can be found on the World Press Photo website. For previous winners, have a look at the World Press Photo 2012 Winners, as well as Jodi Bieber and the Other Afghan Girl.

NASA has had a great knack for producing awe-inspiring images. In its history of space exploration, the most jaw-dropping photographs are usually those that involve stars and galaxies thousands of light-years away. A few other great images, however, are much closer to home. In this iconic image of a lonely spaceman stuck between earth and nothingness, NASA was able to successfully perform a free spacewalk for the very first time. This is the story of Bruce McCandless and the photograph of the floating astronaut in space.

The flying spaceman in the picture is Captain Bruce McCandless II, credited for having made the first untethered free flight in space. Previously, and even now, any Extra-Vehicular Activities (EVAs) performed by astronauts were done so with a tether. Spacewalks were thus limited to the length of the tether. With the new Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU), spacewalks could be performed untethered.

The free flight was done on February 12, 1984 with the nitrogen jet backpack. McCandless traveled some 320 feet away from the space shuttle Challenger, farther than any astronaut had attempted ever before. The resulting view showed a small astronaut against the blackness of space and the pale blues and whites of the earth.

Check out NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day or their Multimedia Section for more details on Bruce McCandless and the floating astronaut in space image. For more NASA and Space related images, check out previous posts under this category.

This generation of photographers are the most competitive in any category. Whether it's in portraiture or landscape or photojournalism, photographers have to be more creative with the kinds of images they make. Most photographers are lucky to have one of their pictures published in a leading magazine or newspaper, but a few others seem to have the natural talent to get a different shot over and over again. Damon Winter shows he does it with his cinematic photojournalism.


Damon Winter is a commercial photographer specializing in portraits. He has shot for different publications, including the Los Angeles Times,  but is now more well known for his photographs for the New York Times. His celebrity portraits have a more dramatic and captivating style to them, a quality that is also found in his photojournalism.

In 2005, Winter was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography for his series on sexual abuse victims in remote Eskimo villages. He was also recognized for his work with the National Journalism Award for Photojournalism (PDF link).

Over the last decade, Winter has earned numerous accolades for his work. The photographer won two World Press Photo Awards, one in 2006 for his dramatic black-and-white portrait of Clint Eastwood, the other in 2007 for his landscape photograph of the Brooks Mountain Range in Alaska. In 2009, Winter finally won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature photography for his exceptional coverage of then Senator Barack Obama's first presidential campaign. His photographs on politics showed off an almost cinematic side to the campaign for the White House.

One of the more controversial awards Winter has received was the third place in the 2011 Photographer of the Year Awards for his entry, "A Grunt's Life" covering a platoon of soldiers embedded in Afghanistan. Winter only used an iPhone for his photographs, but the controversy came from his use of the Hipstamatic app which drastically altered the look of the images. Because of this "photo editing", some people won't consider his pictures as photojournalism, only simple photography. This intensified the debate for the definition of photojournalism, but there's no doubt that his pictures were a refreshing view of the ongoing American war in Afghanistan.


Winter's reportage photographs make viewers look twice as they have a movie-like quality to them, as if they were staged just so they were dramatic. Of course, as any good photojournalist will know, it's really a combination of great lighting, timing and positioning, along with conscious preparation beforehand. For Winter, it seems as if all of his documentary photographs happen to luck out on the best lighting, timing and position every time.

His portraits also have a very engaged quality to them, which makes it clear that Winter prepares his set to ensure that his subjects are comfortable before his camera. This is a philosophy he takes wherever he goes in order to get a different angle on things in order to "...look beyond the obvious, in a more subtle way."


This is Damon Winter's website. More cinematic photojournalism over on his New York Times blog. For another take on cinematic photography, have a look at Alex Prager.

Alex Prager's use of overly saturated color in her photographs might not seem like anything special nowadays, but barely 40 years ago, serious photographers only used black-and-white film. Color photographers were regarded as unworthy of attention in the art world. Things changed when the Father of Color Photography, William Eggleston pushed the boundaries of color film and print.


William Eggleston showed off his artistic side early in life. He learned to play the piano and drew as a hobby. His fondness for the visual arts would stay with him throughout his teenage years, which translated well when he was given a camera in his University years. Eggleston began taking photographs only as a pastime but as with many great artists, he only focused on the medium as a career while going through another photographer's images.

That inspiring photographer was Henri Cartier-Bresson, and as Eggleston looked through the black-and-white pictures of the pioneering street photographer, he decided to follow suit and become a professional photographer himself. While color photography was already available at that time, Eggleston first photographs were also in black-and-white as this was considered the norm; color photography was only used for amateur family pictures or commercial print ads while "serious" photographers only took pictures in black-and-white.


Eggleston soon grew tired with the black-and-white standard and decided to go with color photography. He began to garner attention not only because of his color pictures, but also because of their content. Eggleston chose to photograph the ordinary and mundane, capturing people, objects and places that wouldn't have been considered worthy of attention of other photographers. Critics described his photographs as banal and vulgar, and indeed, many of his photographs were quite provocative.

Still, Eggleston enjoyed a relatively successful career as a photographer despite of (or because of) these criticisms. His preference for color photography was slowly gaining acceptance, but it was only around 1973 that his color images truly took off. It was then that Eggleston turned his attention to the dye-transfer process. This printing process was mostly only being used for print ads on glossy magazine pages. When applied to his art photographs, another level of color was achieved.


Eggleston was very impressed with the dye-process results. Describing the print of his "Red Ceiling", (the cover photo above and one of his most famous images), he says, "'The Red Ceiling' is so powerful that, in fact, I've never seen it reproduced on the page to my satisfaction. When you look at a dye-transfer print it's like it's red blood that is wet on the wall."

In the art collector's world, Eggleston's name still remains relevant. In a Christie's auction held last year, 36 original prints by the photographer fetched over $5.9 million. While it may seem like an outrageous price, outside of the art world Eggleston is still revered for breaking the rules of serious photography and going with his instinct to prove that color is a vital of photography, paving the way for photographers such as Steve McCurry, Mika Ninagawa, Alex Prager, Hiroshi Sugimoto and many others.


The William Eggleston Artistic Trust has more information about the Father of Color Photography. For hardbound editions of his works, there are the William Eggleston's Guide, Chromes and Los Alamos Revisited among many others. For a different take on color, have a look at Steve McCurry, Mika Ninagawa, Alex Prager and Hiroshi Sugimoto.

Winter still dominates much of the northern hemisphere, so it's only fitting to feature more photographs on this subject. This special season only heightens the feeling of loneliness and the perception of endlessness with its foggy textures and white-gray hues, but what happens when these feelings and perceptions are presented in an area with less than one person per square kilometer? Alexander Gronksy tries to answer that question in his series, "Less Than One".


Alexander Gronsky has already been previously featured here for his series "The Edge", photographs that explore the meeting points of the urban and rural, civilization and nature, and everything that involves these boundaries. He focuses most of his energies into exploring old concepts and presenting them in a new format, especially with regards to subjects in Russia.

In his series, "Less than 1", Gronsky points his camera at the same subjects, but this time with the aim of documenting the areas in Russia with a population density of only one person per square kilometer. The photographer traveled to the countries outlying areas to see what life is like in such a sparse environment. The results might look like of his other projects, but the element of his purpose adds an additional dimension the photographs in this series.


The photos in this series were also taken during the making of Gronksy's other work, "The Edge". This previous project done in the cold months of winter on the outskirts of Moscow heightened the sense of loneliness and isolation of his subjects as well as provide a more minimalist view for the entire series. Gronksy also revisited several of these sites, as he took three years to complete this work beginning in 2006.

While many of these photographs lack a human subject, there is still a strong feeling of people, whether it's the sense of their awaited arrival, or the dread of their imminent departure. Scenes like a colorful playground without any children, a group of townspeople seeing off the lone ferry at their port, or simply the trash littered around the ground all point to a civilization that seems to be waiting for spring in order to start living again.


Even with the strong human element in his images, Gronsky sees himself more as a landscape photographer. This frame of mind only helps to emphasis the environment in his photographs as they add a strong foundation for his visual stories. Thus, Gronksy has been described as a photographer who belongs to the new generation of graphic documentary photographers.

Gronksy's series on these places in Russia have a strong sense of nostalgia, as if the old days of the Soviet Empire still reign, yet they also hint at a more hopeful future, when spring will come to wash away the gloom. For this beautiful collection showing what the world is like in a place with a population of only less than one, Gronsky received the Foam Paul Huf Award for 2010.


Alexander Gronsky's website is here. His previous series on "The Edge" can be found here. His published works can be found in the book, Contact Sheet 166: Pastoral. For more features on landscape photographers, check out these previous posts.

This week, the Flickr Commons celebrates its 5th Year Anniversary. Since launching over half a decade, ago The Commons has helped propagate unique and beautiful photographs from different educational institutions around the world, all for free. Here is a sampling of the anniversary galleries of Flickr Commons' Five Year Anniversary Celebration.


The Flickr Commons was launched on January 16, 2008 in order to present "hidden treasures in the world's public photography archive". The initial images showcased in partnership with The Library of Congress was aimed at improving the accessibility of publicly held photographs, and to allow the general public to contribute information about these photographs.

Since its inception, the library of photographs and images has grown to over 250,000 from 56 libraries, archives, museums and educational institutions around the world. Some of the other participating organizations include the Smithsonian Institution, the George Eastman House, the New York Public Library, and NASA on The Commons.


Normally, any photograph whether or not it's on the Internet is protected by copyright. This legal protection (usually for a limited time only) gives the photograph creator, owner or copyright holder the right to be credited for his work, decide when and where it can be used, and who can gain monetary income from it.

In The Commons' case, the images come with "no known copyright restrictions". This is either because the copyright has already expired and the work is now in public domain, or the institution which owns the copyright is no longer interested in exercising control over the work.

Of course, the statement is not foolproof as copyright law varies from country to country. These organizations also cannot guarantee that all images are in public domain as some of them lack proper documentations. Still, these institutions are providing these images for free as they believe to the best of their knowledge that they are not violating anyone's copyright through the sharing of these photographs.


Over the five years since its launching, The Commons has given greater access to images that would normally only reside in museums and libraries. Their availability and descriptions have also been improved by the tags and comments left by viewers around the world. So far, there are now over 2 million tags and 165,000 comments accumulated by The Commons images.

These images here represent the garnered the most views, comments or favorite marks by viewers, and were selected by the different Commons member institutions themselves. The Commons still accepts photographs and images every day, but the most effective way for the ordinary viewer to add to body of work is to leave insightful comments and tags to the photographs already in the archive.


Visit the Flickr blog to find out more about five year anniversary of the Commons on Flickr. The full galleries can be viewed here, here, here, and here. For some previous features from the Library of Congress, check out Bound for Glory - Color Pictures of Old America, Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky - The Glory that was the Russian Empire and The Glory That Was Kodachrome.

With the new year comes the chance to recap the best entries of the previous year. National Geographic, one the leading publications in photojournalism, continues to encourage the tradition of excellence in professionals and amateur photographers alike with its photography competitions. Here are National Geographic Photo Contest 2012 winners.


This year saw the National Geographic Photo Contest 2012 accept some 22,000 entries from 150 countries, from beginners to professionals, all hoping to be recognized in at least one of these three categories: People, Places and Nature. Each of these categories had a winner, with honorable mentions included. A Grand Prize Winner was selected out of all of the categories and entries combined. A Viewers' Choice was also selected for each of category. Overall, there were 13 top photographs selected by the judges.


The winners of the Places category were Nenad Saljic, Indra Swari Wonowidjojo, and Adam Coish. The People category winners included Micah Albert, Wendell Phillips, Ulrich Lambert, Kwan Ka Shing, and Kai-Otto Melau. The Nature category winners were Ashley Vincent, Fransisca Harlijanto, Jason Ching, Eric Guth, Micheal Eastman, and Sanjeev Bhor, with the Grand Prize going to Ashley Vincent.


There was some controversy this year as one of the original winners, Harry Fisch, was disqualified shortly after he was informed of his winning entry. After mailing the contest organizers a copy of his original photograph, his entry was disqualified as it seemed he had edited the photo against the rules of the competition.

Fisch had edited out a small plastic bag in a scene he captured in Varanasi, India. Unfortunately, the competition rules state that "only minor burning, dodging and/or color correction is acceptable", and Fisch's edit was considered a major image edit. This just goes to show how even a small edit can affect even the best entries into a photo contest.


The full gallery of the National Geographic Photo Contest 2012 winners can be found here. For a very related photo contest, check out the winning entries to the National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest 2012.