Remember report cards?

Late winter and early spring is when many photojournalists think they get their grades, because that's when most annual contests are judged.

Getting ready for contests is like getting ready for final exams...the deadlines come at the same time every year, but photographers are often unprepared until the last minute, when they frantically poke through electronic archives and negative files, looking for their best work of the year.

Last week, Liana Cooper, Jim Slosiarek, and I pulled copies of newspapers from last year from "the morgue," a basement storage room at The Journal Times, for our first contest of the season, the Milwaukee Press Club contest. The contest is judged from tearsheets. Some photographers think that contests judged on tearsheets or "clips," are the best kind, because they are based on what the readers have plopped on their front porch every morning.

Other contests are judged from disks, from prints, or from slides. My favorite one, the Wisconsin News Photographers Association (WNPA) contest, is judged from mounted 11x14 prints which are displayed on huge racks for judges, contestants, and observers to linger over. That contest is my favorite one, because there is so much opportunity to involve people in the judging process and in the photos themmselves. They can hold the prints and study them and read the captions on the back before the judging starts. All the winning entries are then displayed on the racks the next day for seminar participants and guests at the contest and seminar hotel headquarters to study. For me, that beats having pictures flash in sequence on a projection screen or a computer monitor, the way I still prefer to hold a newspaper, magazine, or book in my hand, rather than be limited to reading things on the Internet.

John Ahlhauser, left, Nancy Andrews, and Scott Lewis judge the 1998 Wisconsin News Photographers Association POY (Pictures of the Year) contest in Madison, June 12, 1998. They have asked contest chairman Bill Olmsted to take a print off the judging racks and read thm the caption which is pasted on the back. No captions or entry labels are allowed on the fronts of the mounted prints. Photo by Joseph W. Jackson III. (c) 1998 Wisconsin State Journal

I've been on both sides of contests, as a contestant and as a judge. As a contestant, your emotions go up and down and the judges look over dozens of competing entries. Your hopes rise as they linger over a favorite picture of yours, they fall when they skip over your entries. As a judge, you are aware of the responsibility you have to try to evaluate work that means so very much to the entrants, in a limited amount of time.

Egos, career hopes, and listings for resumes are among the things that are at stake. There is a give and take between judges as they look at the photos. Sometimes there is a fair amount of horse trading..."I'll give you that one for second place if you move this one which you wanted to eliminate up to an honorable mention."

While contests are important to many photographers, they have to be put in perspective. Tom Hubbard, who has retired from a career as a working photojournalist and a teacher, has observed that a certain number of entries in a given contest reflect photographers trying to imitate what won last year. Not only should their work be more significant than merely imitating a formula, but they are also forgetting two considerations: first, that there will be an entirely different set of judges with different perspectives the next year; and second, that the same set of judges might judge the same photos differently a week earlier or later.

I learned how subjective contest judging is early in 1981 when I won the WNPA Clip Contest Photographer of the Year award. That contest is judged monthly, so I was confident that winning the clip contest meant I would do very well in the more prestigious annual print contest. After all, if 12 different sets of judges liked my work from the past year, I was bound to do well with 11x14 prints of the same photos. I was also dead wrong about my presumption. The 13th set of judges didn't like any of my photos. Some people question the importance of contests. While some photographers seem to live and die by them, others don't bother to enter. I remember the morning in 1979 when I was flush with confidence after winning a first place award over the weekend in the WNPA print contest. Our then-photo editor was nearby and growled, "Yeah, that's great, but that was for last year's pictures, and I want to know what he has for tomorrow's paper."

Contest entries in the Sports Action category are displayed on racks before judging begins in the Wisconsin News Photographers Association annual Photographer of the Year competition in Madison, Wis. Photo by Joseph W. Jackson III (c) 1998 Wisconsin State Journal

Bill Lizdas, a staff photographer at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, was named WNPA's Photographer of the Year when he worked at the Racine Journal Times in 1977. He told me that he entered only pictures that he liked...some of which people said didn't have a chance of winning. He wasn't interested in playing the game of trying to guess what judges might or might not like. He won the title, a new camera, and a ticket to a new job.

I've always used contests as a way to look back at my work from the last year and see where I've been. We tend to think that we are only as good as the last assignment we shot. Preparing for a contest lets us look at dozens of those "last assignments" and put our work in perspective.

As a photo editor, I also look at another kind of contest, the one that our staff enters daily, each time the press starts. If we keep getting lots of reprint orders from our readers, if we keep seeing our work on classroom bulletin boards and hanging on refrigerator doors, and if we find out that our photos have made a difference in the community and in peoples' lives, then we are winning what might the biggest and most important contest of all, the one judged by our readers.

Behind the Viewfinder - A Year in the Life of Photojournalism
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