Year in Pictures 2008

And exactly WHO decides what are the "pictures of the year"? Such lists of various items seem to have become an end-of-the-year necessity.

As for whether or not pictures were posed, the news media these days are so taken with themselves that they would scarcely be willing to admit any such thing. They do everything they can to engineer elections, so why not photos, too?
 
On the MSNBC News site they have a section call "Photos of the Week" and one can vote for their favorite...The photos of the year list may come from photos with the highest votes during the whole year...
As for me, I just enjoy viewing any good photograph, taken by anyone, anywhere...
 
I can relate to what Woolen is saying - I think part of it is that in photojournalism, a single image apart from the rest really doesn't carry the power that a series or entire photo essay does, because it lacks context and the power of the supporting images. My guess is all the images selected are from a series covering the entire event depicted, and if we could see all the images in a storyline, they might speak more to us both individually and as a whole. I think maybe we expect a bit too much from photography sometimes when we look at individual images, especially in photojournalism. Art photography is a different thing, in which images are meant to be consumed more as a painting or sculpture might.

That said, I felt there were quite a few very impressive images in that group - thanks for the link! As always, it doesn't matter how many frames were burned to get these images - I like to loosely quote one of the greatest photojournalists of all time - W. Eugene Smith - when battling for editorial control of what got into Life magazine...

"My negatives are private... as in my bedroom."

Matt
 
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