The 2009 Women In Photojournalism contest winners have been announced, and the NPPA has published a gallery of the winning images, which will be exhibited during the Women In Photojournalism seminar taking place June 10 in Las Vegas. I’m surprised I haven’t seen this linked elsewhere; maybe it isn’t considered a prestigious contest…. Regardless, it’s great to see a seminar and contest that directly addresses gender in the photojournalism field.

Alixandra Fazzina - Siamoy feeds her one-month old baby in Badakhshan, where a harsh landscape and lack of infrastructure have given rise to an astonishingly high rate of deaths during childbirth. In this distant corner of the world, for every 100,000 babies born, 6,500 women will die.

The above picture, from Alixandra Fazzina’s work for Time on maternal mortality in Badakhshan, Afghanistan, made me stop in my tracks. Beautiful tones, references to western art history, strong story telling. Wow. The rest of the essay, while good, doesn’t rise to the masterful level of this picture, but is well worth a look. A couple of other things strike me about the essay: it’s about women in Afghanistan and it’s not directly about the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan. While I don’t know the circumstances of the shoot, hopefully this means that we’ll soon be seeing more work from outside the US military’s embedding system. There’s much more going on in Afghanistan right now, and the world needs to know about it. This is a great start.

While we’re on the subject of Time’s photo essays, it looks like there’s now (or maybe always was, I just didn’t notice it) an RSS feed for their photo section. Instant subscription.

W. Eugene Smith - from the essay Country Doctor

This looks interesting.  Seems as though Life magazine will soon be publishing their archive online.  Right now, there’s just a placeholder page with a place to put your email for updates when the site adds content.  From the page: “Whatever you want to look at, whether it happened an hour ago, a century ago, or any time in between, you’ll be able to find it here quickly, easily, and for free.”  Sounds great to me.  (via APhotoEditor.com)Bonus fact: the first cover of Life (below) was shot in Montana by a female photographer, Margaret Bourke-White (wikipedia bio, some pictures).  While a couple of notable female photographers come to mind from that era, Dorothea Lange, for instance, I’d imagine the field of photojournalism back then was dominated by men back then even more so than today; makes me happy to think that beginning of the most important magazine in the history of photography was shot by Margaret Bourke-White.

Margaret Bourke-White - Fort Peck Dam, first cover of Life magazine.