It was in a dark room. Three judges sat in the front with a button device in hands. "OUT" "OUT" "IN". They were doing the first round of selection. Photos flashed through the screen one by one, the time they had the chance to stay on screen? maybe 3 seconds. There were more than 1600 portraits photos took part in the competition. Till the second round only 98 got selected.
I was doing my "in" and "out" in my heart and unsurprisingly, I said three times as much "IN" as judges did. In the second round, judges started reading captions, some were even in foreign language. In the final round, 6 were chosen.
There was one judge said something about most of the pictures: yes, they are good, but I've seen too many of them. I only looked at 1600 photos, and I already get bored of same technologies and perspectives.
Lots of them were played on marginalized people. There was one picture impressed me a lot at first. It was a cuban underclass worker, soaked in the trash dump fluid. He looked at all of us from under.
We all really liked the photo until one judged said that he felt like the worker was demanded by the photographer to get into the dump for the photo, and the photo was manipulated for the effects instead of showing the true working environment of the worker. The photo was kicked out of the selection right away.
I suddenly remember something I read online about groups of photographers going to the poorest place in China and asked people there to act poor and miserable. Especially for disabled people, there were 3-4 photographers following him/her just for some "excellent shots".
It was so sad.
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