The University of Missouri – Columbia’s Journalism School has selected prize-winning photographs since 1944. That event eventually evolved into Photos of the Year International, which has thousands of entries and hundreds of photographs receiving recognition in a dizzying array of categories.
The image below won the First Place award in the Reportage Division, News Picture Story – Freelance/Agency in the 70th annual competition. The link to the POYi website is below; you can browse through the gallery of images that ranges from the Olympics to Environmental Awareness to all too many pictures of war.
The mission of POYi is to promote and extend the reach of documentary photographers by engaging citizens with documentary photography. POYi is a non-profit, academic program dedicated to journalism education and professional development.
POYi First Place – NEWS PICTURE STORY (Javier Manzano/Agence France-Presse) Two rebel soldiers stand guard in the Karmel Jabl neighborhood of Aleppo as more than a dozen holes made by bullets and shrapnel pepper the tin wall behind them. The dust from more than one hundred days of shelling, bombing and firefights hung thick in the air around them as they took turns guarding their machine-gun nests. Both sides (the Free Syria Army and the regime) rely heavily on snipers – the cat and mouse game of Aleppo’s front lines. The Karmel Jabl and Al-Arqoob neighborhoods are strategically important because of their proximity to the main road that separates several of the main battlegrounds in the city from one of the largest rebel-controlled regions in Aleppo. It is widely believed that if the regime ordered its infantry (most of it is largely composed of Sunni Muslims) to charge the rebels, a large number of the soldiers would defect to the opposition. For this reason, face-to-face combat is rare. Instead, the regime relies mostly on tanks, indirect fire (mortars and artillery), airplanes and snipers. Snipers can hold a line of several streets and can take weeks for the rebels to locate and neutralize.
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Pictures of the Year International
Wow! What a moving picture. And a great photo with the light in the background, dust, etc. Thanks for sharing. http://ohtheplaceswesee.com