Do you follow us on Twitter? Have you liked our Facebook page? Well, if you haven’t then I guess you wouldn’t have known that today’s blog was going to be about the Pictures of the Year competition that’s being held at the University of Missouri-Columbia right now. Guess it would pay to follow us, huh? (wink, wink)
Anyway, to give everyone a break from all the pinning/ pin-realted posts lately I thought it would be kind of fun to go in a different direction once again and talk about the Pictures of the Year competition (after all, we did talk about the College Photographer of the Year and it would only be right to talk about both competitions equally).
According to the POYi website, the competition started in 1944 and was originally titled the “First Annual Fifty-Print Exhibition” contest. The mission of this contest remains the same. Well, what is that? The goals of this competition were and still are “to pay tribute to those press photographers and newspapers which, despite tremendous war-time difficulties, are doing a splendid job; to provide an opportunity for photographers of the nation to meet in open competition; and to compile and preserve…a collection of the best in current, home-front press pictures.”
In 1948, the name changed to the News Pictures of the Year Contest and just nine years after that the name changed again after the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) and the University of Missouri merged their contests. This formed the Pictures of the Year contest. That name stuck until 2001 when the contest was opened up to everyone around the world, thus creating the name Pictures of the Year International.
This year’s contest started last Tuesday (February 5) with the news division. As of today, the judges are going to continue reviewing the sports division, specifically sports story editing and sports photographer of the year. If you’re interested in being a part of the judging you can listen to the live stream and join the chat room. The POYi site also has a detailed schedule of what categories are going to be judged on what days, which is really helpful considering the contest lasts until February 26. (Note: I was going to hyperlink the live stream for everyone but I goofed it up. If you follow the link for the POYi site and scroll down a little bit you’ll see the “Judging Live Stream” icon on the right.)
In addition to having the live stream of the judging, you can feel free to like the POYi Facebook page and/or follow the POYi Twitter account. They also have a Vimeo account if you’d like to check that out as well.
Balfour | Ohio Yearbooks 