It is said that there is neither digital nor analog photography, there is only photography. The means by which a photo is obtained is not really that important. Although it is true that the tools used by the photographer are crucial for certain images to be possible. Or at least possible as the photographer wants them to be conceived.
The Sony World Press Photo photography awards are among the largest in the world. Among other things because unlike other prizes sponsored by photography companies, there are no limits regarding the equipment used to obtain the photos.
Although Artificial Intelligence, a powerful information hook today, has somewhat unfairly stolen the limelight from some award-winning works. Yes again. The SWPAs have demonstrated this year the incredible diversity of means to capture a photo. Both by professional photographers and by those who don't pay their bills with the photos they take.
Interchangeable lens digital cameras, film cameras of all kinds, drones, action cameras, and of course cell phone cameras. All this and something more are the things that we find in this contest. We attended the presentation of the winning works in London.
The first prize-winning project draws attention. That fell to the Portuguese photographer Edgar Martins, who also won first place in the portrait category. In the work Our War, the author follows the trail through Libya of the mortal remains of his co-worker, the photographer Anton Hammer. He disappeared while they were documenting together the conflict that devastated this North African country.
The work consists of a series of portraits made during that journey, in which the photographer uses color and black and white without complexes. Some portraits made of people he met in Libya and who reminded him of his partner because of his appearance or because they had similar ideas and beliefs.
But the freshness of works like Miruku in the Environment category is also very interesting. A work by the photographers Marisol Méndez and Federico Kaplan, whom we interviewed in the video that accompanies these lines at the Somerset House art center in London, where the winning works are exhibited.
These photographers are among those who use photographic film in documentary photography. A trend that seems to be increasing. The work focuses on the Wayuus, an indigenous population of La Guajira, the coastal desert of Colombia. The project examines how a combination of climate change issues and human neglect have led its various members to experience crippling water scarcity.
As these two photographers explain, “we framed the story from a female perspective to better understand how gender inequality and climate vulnerability are interrelated. We sought to highlight the strength and ingenuity of Wayuu women, as we found it inspiring that even under such conditions, they have established themselves as community leaders, teachers, and climate activists. Through our diptychs we wanted to convey a visual balance between raw and lyrical documentation, and achieve a nuanced representation of a multicolored situation.”
Both the work Our War and Miruju show ways of approaching the story that a few years ago would have been seen as pure eccentricity and today are normalized. That is a limit that artificial intelligence as we know it is far, very far from reaching.
