Freeze frame: Search for the best 60 on again

India Press Photo Awards: This year, the best will win Rs 1 lakh and a ticket to the World Press Photo event

Sometimes words are incapable. Other times they are unnecessary. That’s when you need a picture to complete the story. Or even better it. Press photography works between these demanding parameters. And if you are good at the job, your skill deserves more than a byline. It needs an award.

It was that line of thought that prompted the first-ever Ramnath Goenka India Press Photo Awards (IPPA), instituted by The Indian Express Group in December 2004. It returns again, this year, to search for the 60 best shots that showcased the life and times of India in the past 15 months.

Competition categories include spot news, general news, daily life, people in the news, arts and entertainment, nature and environment, sports actions and features. Appreciating that talent with the lens could lie beyond these areas, this year’s contest has introduced a section for advertising photography and one for an international photographer covering India.

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Those outside the world of journalism may undermine the expertise that goes into making those front-page pictures. But capturing a moment complete with its action, background and story while keeping fundamentals of photography intact, all within just a second’s click needs every bit of an alert and imaginative mind. Look through those family holiday album disasters if you need the perspective.

Now consider that sometimes those news pictures have been taken between jostling newspersons with just a minute’s window period to shoot the subject. Often there’s no warning, and photographers must jump traffic snarls, disregard unearthly work hours to reach a spot, ready for that moment that brings all the colour to newspaper readers the next morning.

Amar Ujjala’s photographer Shailendra Pandey captured one such. His shocking frame of a young boy crying over the telephone as he relates the news of his sister’s suicide was selected as the Ramnath Goenka Picture of the Year in 2004. He took home a prize money worth Rs 50,000 and a ticket to Amsterdam to the World Press Photo (WPP) event being held there.

This year the best will win Rs 1 lakh and a WPP ticket. That apart, category winners will have the opportunity to have their photographs exhibited in various cities through September and October and have them compiled into a collector’s item IPPA Year Book.

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To be judged by an eminent panel, the results of this competition will be declared by the end of August. Entries close on July 30. For more information, log on to expressindia.com.