Good Question!

Why Must Award-Winning Photos Be Disturbing?

Heather Horn Sep 17, 2010
Alexander Chancellor reviews the shortlist for the National Portrait Gallery's annual photographic prized, reproduced in British paper The Guardian. One featured a nude women, The Guardian editing out her genitals. The others, he writes, showed
two drug-addicted twins, one obese young woman, and a 14-year-old American girl riding back in triumph from a hunting expedition with a dead deer flung over her horse.
He remarks on the pattern of unsettling subject matter: "Do photographs have to be disturbing, or feature controversial themes, for them to qualify for awards? It never used to be so."

It was, though, at least the case in 1972, when the iconic Vietnam napalm photo by Nick Ut won World Press Photo of the Year.

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