Professional Categories

There are 12 professional categories across three distinct genres:

PHOTOJOURNALISM & DOCUMENTARY

1. CURRENT AFFAIRS
   Headline stories in newspapers and on international TV channels are always accompanied by photographs because they speak louder than words. Increasingly often, they’re used instead of them. This category follows the stories – the global and those on your doorstep – and invites images which freeze moments, capture key personalities and celebrities, mark the news of the day, week or month and turning-point events. Black and white photographs have a long reputation as the favoured vehicle for presenting current affairs, but today colour is accepted as an equally effective means of expression.
2. SPORT
   Images of sports are probably the most ‘read’ in every newspaper. But this category invites much more than just front-page action shots; it is looking for photographs capturing the drama and tension, character studies (of performers and players, onlookers and audiences), the skills and physical transformations associated with every sport, the practising, learning, preparing, dressing. There is also great potential for theatricality, and an opportunity to illustrate the inventive improvisations conjured by impoverished players everywhere in the world.
3. CONTEMPORARY ISSUES
   Not to be confused with Current Affairs, photographs in this category focus on those issues which form the basis of work by campaigners, NGOs (Non-Government Organizations) and charities, and which arouse support, sympathy, donations and action. Covering contemporary issues, they force us to take note of dramas and tragedies, wars and crises both abroad and close to home, a method of keeping the world’s ‘fortunates’ in tune with those in need of assistance or support. They can equally include a blocked canal causing polluted water to run through a village as the controversy over wind farms.
4. ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
   This year, Arts and Entertainment excludes Music, which now has its own category. That still leaves a broad range of subjects – from theatre, musicals, film, literature, visual arts (photography, video, installation) to dance. It invites images of passive consumers as well as the performers, professional and amateur, back-stage producers, set designers, costume-makers, printers, puppeteers, in productions from Bollywood to Stratford, The Proms to Salsa dance classes and Indonesian puppet theatres to solo African drumming.

COMMERCIAL

1. ADVERTISING
   At the top end of the range, Advertising Photography is a vastly expensive medium requiring state of the art cameras and equipment. But its objective is always the same: to transmit a message which sells a product, an idea, a brand. Advertisements come in many different guises, and though the message is carried photographically in the world’s cities, local variations offer great variety - from an African hairdresser’s hand-painted sign, to huge painted hoardings advertising Egyptian films, and village festivals announced on hand-made flyers pinned to trees. Advertising has always attracted avant garde and original designers, painters, graphic artists and photographers; we invite images which match their adventurousness.
2. FASHION
   Depending on your point of view, we are all mannequins; we dress for the day, choose (if we are lucky to have a choice) clothes when we get up and put on ‘an image’, even customize uniforms to suit personality or mood (school children are particularly imaginative). But fashion photography covers the whole spectrum – from producing garments and accessories, to designing and creating, selling and wearing, from atelier to salon to catwalk, sweat-shop to factory, haute couture to street culture. It includes the pure theatre of a fashion shoot, the tension of backstage models, the still-life potential in a pair of shoes. And it always arouses emotion waiting to be portrayed.
3. MUSIC
   Now separated from the other performance arts because of its universal and vast popularity, Music is like Sport in that it is one of the most familiar subjects in a beginner’s portfolio. We are surrounded by images of music and musicians that this category offers a challenge to avoid the clichés, tricks and techniques. But “Music” stretches across so many very different elements - from the silent beauty of a single instrument, the rapt concentration of a classical audience, the screaming and swooning rock fans, entranced African drummer sitting with his kora harp by his hut, a conductor’s baton frozen in mid-air, a rock guitarist grimacing over a striking note, a child’s fingers on a keyboard.

FINE ART

1. PORTRAITURE
   Portraiture typically involves the human face in eye contact with the camera/viewer. Not always, of course, and portraits can reveal a great deal about the subject through down-turned or closed eyes - or even a rear view. From the earliest depictions of people in classical paintings and drawings, the custom has been to emphasize clothes and possessions as indications of status, occupation or culture, and the context is also rich in information. All over the world, people take portraits of family and friends in settings which remind us of that moment, and valued portraits highlight expressions, postures and poses and fix the character of the subjects – focussing on the face, “the window on the soul.”
2. CONCEPTUAL & CONSTRUCTED
   Set-up photographs can be literal, abstract or conceptual, and unlike other categories in the Sony WPA competition, are judged almost entirely on subjective and aesthetic criteria because of the absence of a hard narrative or figurative information. Evaluating these images draws more heavily on the fundamentals of photography – composition, rhythm, design, and use of and manipulation of colour or light. Any subject, whether constructed as a frozen Still-Life in a studio or captured on the wing on location, qualifies, and we are surrounded potential subjects, including the abstract patterns of nature and the constructed chaos of our daily lives. Constructed photographs require a designer’s eye to relish the spatial and sculptural qualities of an object.
3. NATURAL HISTORY
   The search here is to discover and present the structural beauty and order of nature, to illustrate and highlight its exquisite palette and sophisticated designs, and also to transmit the drama of survival which operates at all levels of the natural world (we are excluding the human animals). Some subjects demand technical manipulation and high-definition equipment when shooting from micro or nano to electron levels, but other perfect, original images can be achieved from small, cheap cameras. Like sport, Natural History is a dramatic subject; nature is a stage set, and in many cases, the relationships between the subjects mimic ours – and are often more exciting for that.
4. LANDSCAPE
   Aerial shots of vast sandy dunes, panoramics of rice terraces on a Balinese mountainside, a long view down a village street: the scale of Landscape photography has no limits. It offers the photographer endless pleasure, whether the natural fall of the land untouched by agriculture or industry (an increasingly rare opportunity, but still including a few virgin forests and uninhabited glacial plains), or the un-naturally coloured designs and raw beauty created by the human hand and its machines. Industrial, agricultural, urban and rural landscapes all share the rich benefits of the relationship between the objects in view (buildings, trees, fields, telegraph poles, even humans).
5. ARCHITECTURE
   From plans made with pencils on a drawing board to three-dimensional virtual models on a screen and buildings constructed from remembered designs handed down through generations, Architecture has rich, exotic and diverse possibilities. Buildings viewed from different angles and perspectives convey the beauty of its geometry or a detail of the moulding or brickwork or sculpted mud - and the evidence of the human presence for which it was intended, or simply a portrait of the object occupying space.