A photographer who, last April, invoked California State Shield Law protections revealed one photo and his own name by entering and winning an award in the College Photographer of the Year competition. Alex Welsh, whose work we mentioned previously when it won the Gold Medal in Documentary Photography, photographed a murder scene while working on the Hunters Point story which has been widely recognized this year. Police investigating the crime asked Welsh to hand over images of the crime scene, but Welsh refused to do so, citing protections against releasing journalists’ unpublished material and notes. A San Francisco Superior Court judge sided with the photographer, deciding that Shield Laws applied in this case, and kept the photographer’s name withheld from other media and court documents for the photographer’s safety. The photographer, it turns out, had already released his name and at least one of the images in question to the College Photographer of the Year competition. Now, police again are trying to get Welsh’s cooperation in their investigation. The San Francisco Weekly has more.

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Stepan Rudik - World Press Photo 2010 - disqualified 3rd place Sports Feature

Stepan Rudik - World Press Photo 2010 - disqualified 3rd place Sports Feature - offending image

Stepan Rudik - Original crop

Stepan Rudik - Original File

“After careful consideration, we found it imperative to disqualify the photographer from the contest. The principle of World Press Photo is to promote high standards in photojournalism. Therefore, we must maintain the integrity of our organization even when the outcome is regrettable.” -Michiel Munneke, managing director of World Press Photo

Lens, PetaPixel, and BJP all have good coverage of the latest photo manipulation scandal in photojournalism: World Press Photo has disqualified Stepan Rudik, 3rd place Sports Features in the 2010 contest, for an ethics violation. Rudik removed an element of a picture (see the slideshow above) in violation of World Press Photo contest regulations against image alteration, specifically this rule: “The content of the image must not be altered. Only retouching which conforms to the currently accepted standards in the industry is allowed.” The object seems to stem from the removal of a person’s foot from the background of the picture, which Rudik defended to the BJP, saying, “the photograph I submitted to the contest is a crop, and the retouched detail is the foot of a man which appears on the original photograph, but who is not a subject of the image submitted to the contest.”

I’ve got to echo Asim Rafiqui: What a laughable extreme crop and toning job. Color and tilt correction in photoshop is one thing, moody vignetting in photoshop is another, but this is a whole new level of turning a crap photo into something entirely different. Wow. This, rather than the offending foot, is the bigger problem for the credibility of photojournalism.

Our monthly posting of dvafoto’s deadline calendar. The calendar can be accessed in a web browser, or with ical or xml applications. If you know of any upcoming deadlines not on the list, please send them to deadlines@dvafoto.com or use the submissions page.

Citing difficulty experienced by those trying to upload their entries, Worldpress Photo has extended the 2010 contest deadline to Jan. 17.

Our calendar has been updated.

Also, in speaking with others, it seems like twitter would be a natural way to keep people informed about deadlines. We’ve begun using the #photocalendar hashtag (rss for #photocalendar)

As has sometimes happened in previous years, so many people tried to submit at once on the day of the deadline that some of them could not get through, or experienced random errors.

In order to ease the crunch and allow everyone who has been trying to submit to get their work in, the deadline has been extended to Jan 17, 2010. -Magenta

Magenta’s Flash Forward 2010 deadline has been extended to January 17, 2010.  Good to hear if you missed the deadline.  The contest is open to “All photographers in Canada, the UK and the US, 34 years of age and under….”  Our calendar has been updated.  Here’s the 2009 list of winners, which includes plenty of familiar names.  Also, in addition to the yearly Flash Forward competition, Magenta plans a bi-annual Flash Forward Festival, the first of which will happen in October 2010.

We’re going to start posting our deadline calendar on a monthly basis in the interest of making it more visible. The calendar can be accessed in a web browser, or with ical or xml applications. If you know of any upcoming deadlines not on the list, please send them to deadlines@dvafoto.com.

Tomasz Tomaszewski - Hades - SocialDocumentary.net Winner

SocialDocumentary.net has announced the winners in the site’s “Documenting the Global Recession” contest. Tomasz Tomaszewski’s story “Hades?,” a story documenting widespread loss of industry and jobs in Poland, took the top prize with honorable mentions going to Khaled Hasan, Michael McElroy, and Shiho Fukada, and the People’s Choice awards going to Matt Eich and David Wells. Lots of great work to see behind those links, but I’m especially interested in the contest being used as a way to generate interest in work addressing the economy. We’ve written previously about tired images of financial crises and the difficulty of photographing something as nebulous and abstract as a recession related to complex financial derivatives. These stories recognized in SocialDocumentary.net’s contest humanize complicated international financial issues from a deeply engaged and emotional perspective. Definitely worth a look.

Just got recent word that two photocontests that were to be closing on December 1st have been extended to Monday December 7th.

Socialdocumentary.net’s “Crisis & Opportunity: Documenting the Global Recession” ($35 entry for a series)

The 2010 Anthropographia Award for Human Rights and Photography (Multimedia and stills, $30/series)

As always you can visit Dvafoto’s Deadline Calendar for a roundup of upcoming deadlines on grants and awards. (It is also available as a rss feed and is able to be synced with your own calendar software, but I can’t figure out how to link those here. It is also listed on the bottom of our sidebar over on the right–> Update by Scott: And it’s at the top of this post.). I have a few more listings to add this evening that have come across my radar recently, so check back later. Feel free to send Scott or I your suggestions on items to add to the list if you come across something worthy that we haven’t put up. Happy editing!

Winning the Gold in the Documentary category at this year’s College Photographer of the Year competition was a moving and interesting set of images by San Francisco-based photographer Alex Welsh. He photographed the rapidly changing and troubled neighborhood of Hunters Point in San Francisco over a long period of time, gaining deep access to the community. This project stood out, far and away, from other cpoy work I saw this year for its depth, consideration and visual language. And more recently I’ve been impressed by this interview with Welsh published by The Visual Student blog from the NPPA.

(c) Alex Welsh

At times, I was extremely scared for my own safety and well being, and over time the dangerous lifestyle that the kids around me were living began to take a toll on my sanity, but the more time I spent with the them, the more my convictions about the importance of the work deepened. No journalists in San Francisco really spent enough time in the neighborhood to gain access to the gangs, so it upset me that if I just bailed out of the project, the story simply wouldn’t get told.

This is incredibly strong, personal and important work from a young photographer and I look forward to seeing more from Welsh in the future. Be sure to visit his website for more images from this project and many others.

The Atlanta Photojournalism Contest deadline has been pushed back to Friday, Nov. 20, 2009 at 11:55pm US Eastern time.