A Study On The Winning Works

Man-made or natural disaster always attracts modern media attention because of its suddenness and destruction. High-quality disaster news report does not only take responsibility of protecting social environment but also becomes the hot topics in business industry, intellectual circles and social public because of the injection of high news value and humanistic care. The World Press Photos (hereinafter referred to as WPP) is the most popular news photography competition in the world. Since the foundation of WPP, it takes disaster photography as an important category of marking winning works all the time. There exists a two-way interaction between disaster photography and WPP. Many disaster works become famous because of WPP and WPP is more popular for selecting such kind of works.This article takes all previous winning works of WPP as research object and analyzes multiple academic questions of the winning disaster photos in WPP through documentation method and case study research. Firstly, it concludes the expression forms of winning disaster photos in WPP by collecting and gathering disaster photos. Macro rendering of big-scale scene and portraying close shot and details are two obvious visual expression. While subtle visual rhetoric is relatively dormant. Secondly, this article describes the communicating effect of the winning disaster photos in WPP from positive and negative aspects. For the disaster and destruction that natural disaster brings about, disaster photos can spread news and information directly. These photos have inspirational and alert function on the controllable and preventable man-made disasters. Using disaster photos to guide public opinion can trigger positive behavior of the public. On the other hand, without appropriate shooting and arranging, the actual communicating effect may be out of expectations, and victims and the whole society may even be infringed or hurt. This article tries to analyze the creation strategy of WPP news pictures, including photographer’s positioning, theme choice and the emotional communication and psychological interaction between photographers and another party through the investigation of early research, actual shooting and late choreography of the disaster photos. It also tries to construct an association between creation strategy and the authenticity and emotion of disaster photos. As a special social phenomenon, disaster is closely related to human destiny so disaster shooting is faced with miscellaneous ethical dilemmas. This article discusses the misstep and circumvention of disaster photos in ethics and further expands topics to humanistic care, a higher level ethics. At last, this article takes the development trend of WPP disaster photos as foothold and tries to provide more inspiration for photography practitioners and researchers.