The Sony World Photography Awards is arguably the most prestigious and largest photo contest. The 2024 edition is open to entries and some of its rules are under fire.

Over at Fstoppers, Kim Simpson writes that the Sony World Photography Awards’ Student category doesn’t adequately cater to all photography students. At the heart of the issue is that the contest has age limits in the category, preventing photography students over the age of 30 from entering.

Specifically, the Student category is open to anyone aged from 18 to 30 years old who is in a full-time photography program. Students answer a set brief with five to 10 images, and the judges will select up to 10 shortlisted photographers. An overall winner receives the “Student Photographer of the Year” title, a massive boon to a budding career, and a significant prize package of Sony digital imaging equipment worth €30,000 for them and their school.

Winning the competition is a huge deal for a photographer, and Simpson argues that not all photography students fit neatly into the box the World Photography Organization and the Sony World Photography Awards have crafted.

“A student competition should extend beyond age brackets and celebrate diverse experiences, perspectives, and creative journeys. By imposing an age limit, the competition inadvertently perpetuates a narrow definition of what it means to be a student photographer. Photography is not confined to a specific age group, and the restrictive policies risk sidelining the rich contributions that mature students can bring to the table,” Simpson writes.

Simpson herself became a photography student in her late twenties after she had already entered the field professionally. “The exclusionary nature of these competitions not only affects individuals who, like me, ventured into photography later in life, but also undermines the diversity of perspectives that could contribute to the richness of the artistic discourse within the student community,” the photographer explains.

As an aside, it seems unfair that someone who has been working professionally in the field can enter a student competition, but there is seemingly no restriction about that in the Sony World Photography Awards.

For those who have aged out of the Student category, their only option is to enter the Open category, which is full of amateurs and professionals of all skill and experience levels. Further, the Open category winner receives $5,000 in cash rather than the bundle of Sony imaging equipment for the student and their educational institution.

For Simpson, this is not a truly viable alternative for older students. “To even the playing field, student photography competitions should consider adopting more flexible age policies. Eliminating the upper age limit would acknowledge the varied life trajectories of students,” she concludes.

While it is far too late for the organizers to change their policy for this year’s competition, it is something that the World Photography Organization may want to consider for future editions of the very popular Sony World Photography Awards.

However, is Simpson making a mountain of a molehill? And further, should every category in all photo contests be for everyone to enter? Of course not. Reasonable rules restrict who can enter photo contests. That is nothing new.

Simpson has raised some excellent points and made a strong case that a “photography student” can be of any age, whether a traditional student in their late teens or early twenties or a non-traditional student in their thirties or forties. Undoubtedly, a 46-year-old photography student is just as much of a legitimate student as someone fresh out of high school.

Further, as Simpson says, allowing students across a more comprehensive age range to enter a photo contest will increase the diversity of perspectives in the entrant pool, which benefits the competition at large.

The Sony World Photography Awards argues at the top of its Student category page that it is “providing a platform for photography students worldwide.” If that’s the contest’s primary objective, its age restrictions are counterproductive.

However, if there are other concerns, perhaps the rules make sense. While Simpson argues that pursuing equality would mean removing the age cap from the student category, I think equality could be understood differently.

The same expanded life experience that Simpson believes adds to the student photography competition, I’d argue, unfairly disadvantages younger students who have had less time to gain important perspectives and, perhaps more importantly, literally have had fewer chances to take photos and enhance their skills.

If the primary, or only, concern is showcasing the most diverse range of skills and narratives, then that’s what the Open category is for. The Sony World Photography Awards has different goals for its student category, which is perfectly reasonable.

Simpson is right that photography students aren’t exclusively aged 18 to 30. By operating within this constraint, the Sony World Photography Awards are inherently exclusionary — as is every photo contest, as they all have rules that prevent some people from entering.

The question is not really if the rules should be more inclusive, but precisely what the intention of the student category is, and what the organizers hope to achieve. How the World Photography Organization answers those fundamental questions will determine the most suitable rules and regulations.

Besides, I am way less concerned with the age bracket than that the competition is restricted to those undertaking a “full-time photography program,” which must be a formalized photography course/credit/module/foundation within a diploma/Bachelor of Arts/Master of Arts curriculum. If the goal is inclusivity, a noble albeit always somewhat unattainable aim, the competition should open its student category to part-time students.

Not everyone can afford to enter a full-time college program. Frankly, I’m more interested in seeing the diversity of perspectives that are left out because a part-time student doesn’t count than I am about older full-time students. Further, someone who must juggle improving their educational goals against maintaining a job and possibly raising a family may benefit significantly from the attractive prize pool.

There is no perfect solution and no set of rules that will satisfy everyone. However, that doesn’t mean the Sony World Photography Awards shouldn’t always strive to improve. Does that mean changing how it operates its student category?

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For the first time, scientists have photographed a large, elusive rat that’s on the brink of extinction. Called the Vangunu giant rat (Uromys vika), the critically endangered species lives on just one island in the South Pacific, where logging has decimated much of its forest habitat.

Researchers hope the new photographs of the mysterious creatures will encourage local government leaders to protect the last bits of intact forest on Vangunu, which is part of the Solomon Islands, located northeast of Australia. They shared the images in a new paper published this month in the journal Ecology and Evolution.

Indigenous people in the Zaira community on Vangunu have long known about big rats that dwell in the trees and are capable of cracking coconuts with their teeth. However, researchers who visited the island were never able to observe or capture one, though they did find a large fecal pellet they suspected came from a giant rat in 2011.

Then, in 2015, loggers cutting down a tree captured an injured Vangunu giant rat, which died not long afterward. They preserved the body as well as they could, then sent it to the Queensland Museum in South Brisbane.

From that specimen, researchers confirmed the existence of the mysterious creatures, which are at least twice as large as a common rat. They also formally described the rat in a paper—the first new rodent species from the Solomon Islands to be recorded in more than eight decades.

But as commercial logging continued to fell trees on Vangunu, the scientists knew they needed more information about the giant rats.

They worked with the Zaira community to set up camera traps in tree species the rodents prefer and used sesame oil to lure them. In the past, researchers had tried using peanut butter, but those attempts were not successful—it only appealed to non-native black rats.

In the end, the team captured 95 images of four individual Vangunu giant rats—three females and one male. All the photos were taken at night, with most centered around midnight.

Collaborating with the Zaira community was critical to the project’s success, the researchers say.

“The knowledge is with the people,” says study co-author Kevin Sese, a researcher at Solomon Islands National University, to the New York Times’ Rebecca Carballo. “They are the custodians of the local knowledge… If it weren’t for them, we wouldn’t have known where to place the cameras.”

The photos are “extremely positive news for this poorly known species,” says study lead author Tyrone Lavery, a mammalogist at the University of Melbourne in Australia, in a statement. “This comes at a critical juncture for the future of Vangunu’s last forests—which the community of Zaira have been fighting to protect from logging for 16 years.”

The Zaira community wants the government to declare their part of the island, located on the southern side, a protected natural area where mining and logging are prohibited. However, the Solomon Islands Environment Ministry gave a logging company permission to operate in the area late last year, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Liam Fox reported in May.

In addition to the 200 people and the giant rats that call Zaira home, the area provides habitat for leatherback turtles and New Georgia monkey-faced bats, which are both vulnerable species.

Documenting the presence of the endangered rat was “considered a vital part of conservation efforts” for Vangunu island, per the statement.

“We know this species doesn’t live in logged forests, so we needed to try and prove it still survived in the remaining forest on the island,” Lavery tells Newsweek’s Robyn White. “Our photographs were only the second time scientists have documented the species. We showed it still survives, and we highlight the importance of the last remaining tract of forest on Vangunu.”

In a baffling move that was certain to disappoint, PhotoVogue has stuck to its decision to feature AI-generated content alongside real photography in the latest edition of their festival. As usual, we at The Phoblographer are on the side of Photography as an Art made by humans. But this is far more alarming than we think. To recap on how alarming this is, Gizmodo Spain recently laid off their entire staff to replace them with AI. Sports Illustrated, too, was caught publishing articles made by AI. So with PhotoVogue, a branch of a long respected place for photographers, now adhering to and sticking to this decision, when will photographers be next? And more importantly, what can we do about it?

Paraphrasing writer Talia Lavin, we think things should stay human in this business — at the very least, as human as humanly possible.

The head of Global PhotoVogue, Alessia Glaviano, does not appear to share this point of view, even though she makes a bit of an effort to hide this behind an ultimately hollow statement on her Instagram page.

It’s crucial to differentiate the contexts in which photography is used. When it acts as a journalistic document, the act of bearing witness is paramount, and we must fiercely guard its integrity. This form of “witness photography,” a term I encountered in a conversation with @alexcartagenamex , beautifully encapsulates its essence. But when photography transitions into the realm of art, it’s a vehicle for one’s imagination. If we view photography as a canvas, where pixels replace paint, can we then use A.I. to manifest our most profound thoughts? Can we so swiftly denounce A.I.-generated images in art? Is art not about conveying our ideas, regardless of the medium?

While the expression “witness photography” by itself makes me cry a little bit, what interests me the most is the fact that Miss Glaviano seems to forget AI content doesn’t come out of nowhere but from millions of images sourced from artists who did not give their permission nor received any compensation. Thankfully, every coin has two sides, and the Festival —held in Milan from November 16 to 19th— came with a series of really fascinating lectures.

These lectures were collectively called, “What makes us human? Image in the age of AI,” and we’ve gone through some of them.

Filippo Venturi and His “Broken Mirror”

Filippo Venturi is a documentary photographer with a degree in computer science and more than a few photography projects in his portfolio. He’s been wondering about what he calls syntography and its uses and effects in the real world, from the way Amnesty International used AI imagery to protect Colombian protesters to its influence in fashion and advertising. In the journalism ethics world, there’s a lot wrong with that — but Amnesty International isn’t an accredited journalistic publication.

In the end, despite all of this pondering, he decided to use AI to try and portray “the totalitarian dictatorship that characterizes North Korea,” a country he had already visited and captured with his camera.

For this purpose, he used “insects and spiders,” varying in size and number, to symbolize the submission of the North Korean citizens.

As he acknowledges, the creative process was largely done by the software itself, leaving him to select the final images, a compromise between what he wanted to achieve and what was offered by the machine.

This makes me think, is it your work if all you’ve got to offer is your veto capability?

Luckily, Filippo Venturi comes out at the end: “after several months fully immersed in this technology, I felt a strong need to return to photographing people.”

See his lecture here.

Mutale Nkonde, “Pretty Girls Look Like This”

Mutale Mkonde is the coauthor of the report “Racial Literacy In Tech” and founder of the non-profit AI For The People. In her lecture, she talks about how AI —and AI Products like Lensa— is affecting young people’s self-esteem and self-image.

This brings up various questions, of course: What is beauty? Why is its canon so Eurocentric? How is AI harming our mental health, regardless of gender? What policies should an app have during development to assure accuracy and avoid harming people?

She believes in the need for legal frameworks that include all of us, not just in images, but in the value those images bring.

See her lecture here.

Refik Anadol About “A.I., Photography, and Our Futures”

Refik Anadol has one of the most interesting lectures in the Festival. He touches how about most of the images we take today, using our cellphones, are nothing but algorithmic imaginations.

The sky turned orange because of the wildfires in Canada, and when you made a picture with your cellphone, the sky looked blue because the cell phone didn’t understand that a sky could be orange”.

Indeed this is true because of how much the processor does the work. Though at the same time, we can apply this idea to modern digital photography with things like in-camera lens corrections, firmware updates, and all.

In this case, the first victim is credibility. Our own phones do not capture what we see, so why should we believe in images we see on the Internet? In certain ways, photography has driven our behavior in the past two centuries; from the aid dispatched to the Dust Bowl thanks to Dorothea Lange to the withdrawal from Vietnam caused by the picture of Kim Phuc taken by Nick Ut, photography has managed to galvanize humanity into action again and again.

Right now, though, there are dozens of AI-generated images of the conflict in Gaza. Who does that serve? What’s the purpose? What’s the use of fake content about a real tragedy?

As Refik says, “the problem with AI isn’t the actual images, it’s the fact that any image may be AI, so you begin to be skeptical of all images,” which leads to inaction.

See his lecture here.

A Quick Overview

These are not all the lectures given in the festival, of course; you may go ahead and watch Addressing Ethical Dilemmas by Millie Tran, the talk on Multimedia Forensics by Paolo Bestagini, Navigating Truth on the age of AI by Daniele Moretti or the very interesting panel on “Envisioning Tomorrow: A.I. and the Future of Visual Narratives” starring Chiara Bardelli Nonino.

The fact that PhotoVogue is willing to exhibit AI content next to what is real photography is disappointing, yes – but the discussions and lectures they’ve held on the future of our craft are not to be lightly discarded.

I really, really recommend a watch.

Cover image by Jvdas Berra, Vogue Photographer, as published on his thoughts on AI imagery. Additional reporting was provided by Chris Gampat