Charting the World Press Photo Awards

Every spring, as with few exceptions in every year since 1956, the best press photos of the year are honored with the World Press Photo Award. The winning image of 2021, The First Embrace by Danish photographer Mads Nissen, shows a touching but hopeful scene from a nursing home in São Paulo, Brazil in the context of the Corona pandemic. The photo contest has long fascinated me with its combination of contemporary history and photographic art. After all, it's not uncommon for the winning images to be horrific and beautiful at the same time.

Digging into the competition's worthwhile archive, I wondered what visual fashions and technical developments this documentation of contemporary history is subject to, and whether these can be made visible via simple image processing. To this end, I looked at how the average brightness, colorfulness, and color selection of the winning images have changed over the decades. Another aspect was the question of how representative the winning images actually are spatially distributed and what the frequencies are among the photographers' countries of origin.

Our picture of the world is getting darker…

Calculating the average brightness of all pixels of the winning images, there is a slight trend that darker images have won more often than brighter ones in the past decades. However, this is not a very strong trend, and there are of course outliers: For instance, the winning image from 2017 was taken in an art gallery with bright lighting and white walls.

… but it’s not black and white anymore

Photojournalism was dominated by black-and-white images until the late 1970s, probably because most print products were not printed in color. Technically speaking, it would have been possible to depict the world in color much earlier. The first winning color image, which was to remain unique for many years thereafter, won in 1967. I determined the degree of colorfulness with the help of this tutorial. The following charts shows the results over time. For me, it was striking that after a phase of relatively colorful images in the 1980s, between 1993 and 1997 only black and white images won the award.

Using a Python library, I created a palette of the most important colors of each of the winning images and placed them in a timeline. Since I do not own the rights to the original images, they are linked in the table. Be advised: The content is quite graphic in many cases. As already seen in the previous chart, one can easily recognize the years in which the winning pictures were taken in black and white. What is striking to me is how muted the colors often appear. Quite in contrast to often very strong colors, such as those created by Instagram filters. In a few years, it will be worth seeing whether this trend will change and the images will become more color-intensive.

The geography of newsworthiness

In the following map I have compiled the locations of all winning images since 1956. A quick glance is enough to understand that many parts of the world were not yet in the spotlight of the press and not documented through winning pictures in the competition. Since the winning pictures are often taken in places of horror, it may be a good sign for these empty spots on the map. But at the same time it shows all the places to which journalists do not have free access.

In contrast to the locations of the winning images, a much more concentrated spatial pattern emerges when looking at the photographers' home countries: Europe and especially the USA predominate the photos that win the competition. I do not believe that this is a healthy distribution.