Exhibition judging sometimes unfair to exhibitors that follow the rules

It has long been a practice to have the Photo Travel and Photojournalism Divisions' standards read before the judging of an international exhibition begins. But how long do the judges retain what they have just heard? Unless a judge is an exhibitor in the Division he is judging and has the standards well ingrained, I believe he should not be selected to judge an exhibition.

The beautiful images printed in the PSA 2005 Exhibition Catalog and in the November Journal bring into question how we are selecting judges and what they retain of the standards for images. Looking at the Photo Travel Print section (PSA Gold Medal winning print) it is obvious that the image is a composite when you consider the direction of light on the Taj Mahal and that on the "drop in" image of the Indian gentleman. It only takes one judge to say "That's a composite" and to disqualify the image, but where was that one qualified judge?

In the 2005 Circle of Confusion Exhibition Catalog one of the Photojournalism judges gave a Judge's Choice medal to an obviously setup image: two young girls with a hose going through the ears of one and into the mouth of the other and then coming out her ear with water squirting out the end of the hose. In all my years as a newspaper photographer I would never have expected to stumble across an image like this. Humor, yes--but photojournalism? No, No, and NO.

Publishing examples like this can hurt the credibility of an exhibition and especially PSA-recognized exhibitions and are extreme examples of exhibitors "Seeing what they can get away with" and judges not knowing what they are looking at or not knowing the parameters of the Division. It is unfair to all those exhibitors that play by the rules.

Dale R. Gilkinson, FPSA

Glendora, California

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