We can write about the social preconditions for this law, we can tell about the consequences, and we can talk about what it means to be a homosexual in Russia. However, words cannot give us quite the same sense of the issue – of what it is like to be a homosexual or a homophobic in Russia – that photographs can.

This is evident from the winner of World Press Photo of the Year 2014 above. This picture, “Jon and Alex”, taken by the Danish photographer Mads Nissen, shows two young Russian homosexuals at Alex’ home in Saint Petersburg. They have been making love. Nissen has caught a tender, intimate moment of affection and desire. The picture has a rare quality of being out of time and space. It gives us no sign of where or when it is taken. There are no visible clothes, no phones, no furnishing – nothing but the young naked bodies in front of the heavy drapes in the background. The colours are dark; the bottom completely black, the background obscure and golden brown. there is only darkness except for the light on the faces and upper bodies of the two men.

The spiritual sense of eternity and indeterminacy is supported by the man lying down. We know that he is alive, but he looks almost dead or in solemn ecstasy. The picture draws upon a dominant motif in the history of sculpture and painting: Christ lying in the arms of Maria in Michelangelo’s Pietá (1498–99) or Caravaggio’s Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy (1595).

Even though Nissen’s picture is about love and affection – at least on the surface of it – the feelings and the pain depicted in such historic representations, offer a way of understanding the pain that surrounds a sheltered moment of love in Saint Petersburg. This understanding gains further emotional power when seen in context with Nissen’s other photographs in his series “Homophobia in Russia”, which document the harassment and violence towards gays in Russia. The pain seemingly absent in “Alex and Jon” is lurking underneath.

Like many of Caravaggio’s baroque paintings, Nissen’s photograph of “Jon and Alex” is a creation of darkness made significant by a few areas of light, in which we can project our own sentiments and ideas. Interestingly, even though the colours are brighter, we see Caravaggio represented in a similar way in director Derek Jarman’s fictionalised re-telling of the painter’s life; in this film still showing Caravaggio lying ill in his bed.

In many ways, Nissen’s picture also has the quality of a film still tableau. The photograph is not a news shot, it is not a picture of an important event, it is not even a picture of a public event.

Through the history of the winners of World Press Photo, the most common trait has been depiction of war and violence, suffering and conflict. Generally the pictures are from areas outside Western Europe and the USA. Historically, most have been news photos shot in Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America. Recently, more winners have been pictures from the Middle East. (I elaborate in the paper: Formulas of Prize-Winning Press Photos.)

The picture of “Jon and Alex” seems to be from nowhere – or everywhere. It is a private moment, not a public event. It is tender and loving, not violent and painful. If it’s different from the traditional winners over the years that way, however, it seems to also be part of an emerging trend among the winning photographs of recent years: a cinematic aesthetics that combines artistic compositions with invitation to storytelling.

Compare, for instance to the 2007-winner by Tim Hetherington showing a US soldier sinking onto an embankment in a bunker in Afghanistan. As in Nissens’ picture the colours and lines are not bright, crisp or clear, but rather dark, indistinct and almost blurred. Here as well the brightest point is the face of a human being.

Even though Hetherington’s picture reports on a very public event, a war, it nevertheless seems to present a private moment of an individual.

The same retreat to an intimate privacy can been seen in Samuel Aranda’s World Press Photo of the Year 2011 (submitted to the “People in the news” category). This winning picture shows a mother, Fatima al-Qaws, cradling her son Zayed (18), who is suffering from the effects of tear gas after participating in a street demonstration in Sanaa, Yemen. The photograph does not show the violent public actions we normally see in news shots; instead it presents us with the repercussions of such events for the private, personal life of individuals. It shows us the love between two people.

The picture is not as dark as Nissens’ photo, but it shares the aesthetics of the earthtone colours and the feature-like quality.

We see a parallel story-telling tendency in the Photo of the Year 2013 by John Stanmeyer. This picture depicts African migrants on the shore of Djibouti City at night raise their phones in an attempt to catch an inexpensive signal from neighbouring Somalia.

Like many of the recent winners, this could have been a film still, and like Nissen’s picture, Stanmeyer’s photo was entered for the “Contemporary Issues” category, not for the “Spot News” competition. More than reporting news, these images deal with a general issue: offering a visual interpretation of a human condition.

One can’t help speculate whether this apparent tendency to a move from spot news photos to more feature-like images might be connected to the fact that cell phones and modern photo equipment makes everyone a news photographer these days. We can all capture a moment with a camera – even in crisp, clear focus. However, exploring a subject visually, telling a story photographically, interpreting a human condition through images, is more difficult. Not many of us have the ability consciously, or even instinctively, to create photographs that allude to the masterpieces of painting, carrying on and extending their exploration of what it means to be a human being. Fortunately, we still have professional photographers with this ability.

Photo credits

photo 1: Mads Nissen
caption: Jon, 21, and Alex, 25, a gay couple, during an intimate moment. Life for lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT) people is becoming increasingly difficult in Russia. Sexual minorities face legal and social discrimination, harassment, and even violent hate-crime attacks from conservative religious and nationalistic groups, 2014.

photo 2: Tim Hetherington
caption: A soldier of Second Platoon, Battle Company of the Second Battalion of the US 503rd Infantry Regiment sinks onto an embankment in the Restrepo bunker at the end of the day. The Korengal Valley was the epicenter of the US fight against militant Islam in Afghanistan and the scene of some of the deadliest combat in the region, 2007.

photo 3: Samuel Arranda
caption: Fatima al-Qaws cradles her son Zayed (18), who is suffering from the effects of tear gas after participating in a street demonstration, in Sanaa, Yemen, 2010.

photo 4: John Stanmeyer
caption: African migrants on the shore of Djibouti City at night raise their phones in an attempt to catch an inexpensive signal from neighboring Somalia—a tenuous link to relatives abroad, 2013.

Illustrating web articles with Creative Commons-licensed photos is a widely used way of improving quality in small publications like ours. As so many others, we use WordPress as publishing system, and we have posted CC-licensed photos since our launch in 2006.

But one aspect of using CC photos in WordPress has not been as easy as it should: Giving the photographer the credit he or she deserves. Or, more to the point — the attribution that is a precondition for republishing the photograph in the first place (see “Best practices for attribution”).

Now we have done something about that ourselves. The WordPress plugin Creative Commons tagger, created by Håvar Skaugen, adds new fields to the media upload tool. When you upload a photo to WordPress, you are asked to add the relevant metadata — image title, source URL, Author, Author URL and crucially, the right Creative Commons license.

The custom fields on the media page where you can fill in the licensing information.

When you add the photo to an article, the caption is now enriched with the metadata and the corresponding CC license icons.

Foto: Elena Pérez Melgarejo cbnd

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At this point, the plugin only supports the Norwegian, US and international versions of CC licenses, but more localized licenses will be added in the future. The plugin also supports localization via the provided .mo-files.

If you have read this, you are probably interested in the distribution of content on the web. In that case, you would perhaps want to check out our other WordPress plugin: Wikipedia for tag pages automatically connects your tag page/topic page to the relevant Wikipedia entry.

However, instead of asking only if prize winning images are manipulated (and of course in some way they all are), we should also ask why are they changed to become the way they are? Or, to put it differently: what kinds of photographs win awards? When we look closer at the changing styles of the winning photographs since the beginning of the World Press Photo competition in 1955, we see that Hansen’s picture is part of a cinematic form of expression that has emerged in the last 6–7 years.

The image portrays family members from Gaza carrying the bodies of a two small children to their burial after being killed in an Israeli air strike. It is no coincidence that it has been called a movie poster. However, the photo is more like a still; a story frozen in time, but condensed with motion and movement, inviting us into a narrative of what has happened before, and what might happen next. This new trend is different from other dominant styles among the WPP winners.

Some of the winning pictures hold what we can call news moments (similar to Henri Cartier Bresson’s decisive moments). Most of the news moments are from the 1960s. A prime example is Eddie Adams’ 1968 picture of the execution of a suspected Viet Cong member, showing the exact moment of the bullet’s penetration of the brain. The impact of the picture lies primarily in capturing a certain news event in a fraction a second.

The closer we get to this century, the fewer pictures we see of such news moments. Instead we see more feature-like photographs capturing – not a moment, but a general situation or condition. Take this winner from 2004 portraying a woman mourning a relative after the Asian tsunami of December 2003.

The photo is constructed around a juxtaposition between the dead body, represented by only an arm in the left of the frame, and the bereaved, represented by a woman lying face down on the sand in the right part of the frame. This kind of explicitly artistic visual rhetoric prevailed from 2000–2004.

The 2001 winner portrays how the body of a one-year-old boy who died of dehydration is being prepared for burial at Jalozai refugee camp in Pakistan. It is a very rare example of a picture being taken in a full bird’s eye perspective, directly from above.

The picture is dominated by the white color of the draping sheets, covering the body of the little boy, so we only see the left side of his face. He seems at peace, and the picture exudes calmness, giving it an almost ethereal dimension. Combined with the angle of the arms draping the sheets, the picture is more an aesthetic moment than it is a news moment.

Hansen’s picture is neither a news moment nor an aesthetic moment – not to say, of course, that it does not have style. All images do. Instead the aesthetic tendency exhibited in this picture is a more of a kind of movie realism, a sort of photographic cinema verité. We see a similar tendency in the winners from 2007, 2008, and 2009.

The 2007-winner shows a US soldier sinking onto an embankment in a bunker in Afghanistan. The 2008 winner depicts a policeman entering a home in Cleveland, USA, in order to check whether the owners have vacated the premises. In 2009 we see women shouting their dissent from a Tehran rooftop following Iran’s disputed presidential election.

These images are not colorful, there are no close ups, no clear, simple or stylized compositions, and no conspicuous juxtapositions or an obvious use of some part to represent a whole. They give the impression of the fictional realism we sometimes encounter at the cinema.

While the beginning of the decade presented photographs that have their main rhetorical appeal in their compositional and aesthetic organization, these photographs appeal more through story-making. The first kind invites the viewer inside the frame, encouraging exploration of the elements in the visual moment, captivating us through visual design. The second kind invites the viewer outside the frame, encouraging participation in the construction of a narrative, engaging us in speculations of what has happened and what will happen.

This kind of neo-realistic press photography seems to be more open to interpretation than the more obvious symbolic photos. The strange thing, though, is that the more the pictures draw us into a story of mostly our own creation, they seem to draw us away from the events they are depicting. They are all fabulous images, but even when provided with the backstories I remain a spectator immersed in the story, in awe of the artwork, waiting for the movie to premiere.

World Press Photo award-winning photographs by Paul Hansen, Arko Datta, Erik Refner, and (clockwise from the upper left) Tim Hetherington, Paul Hansen, Pietro Masturzo, and Anthony Suau.

This text has previously been published on the site No Caption Needed. If you are interested in photojournalism, don’t miss it.