Pictures of the Year -Jennifer Elston

I love looking at photography.  My first instinct is to find black and white photos because I am naturally drawn to them.  There were many moving pictures such as those in the gallery "A Burning Problem."  These pictures visually tell the tale of Nigeria's bitter battle with oil.  One picture, number eight of ten, of a child with burns so bad that he has bone damage shows raw emotion, which is an essential for excellent photographs.  Black and white photographs, in my opinion, better tell the story of emotion than color photography because the viewer is drawn to the emotion or patterns in the photos and not the elaborate color schemes.  

The next striking set of shots were those surrounding the death of Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.  The photographers did not go the event expecting to capture Bhutto's final moments, but took excellent shots despite the chaos and the danger to their own lives.  One photo is entitle "Raw Grief" and it made me look at it exceptionally long.  The photo does not obey the rules of typical excellent photography.  It is not in perfect focus and the subject is sort of in the middle of the picture (violating rule of thirds), but the emotion captured in that photograph is especially striking.

My favorite set of photos were probably the collection called Hotshoe by Carolyn Drake, which detail life for young girls in Ukrainian orphanages.  The girls have very little.  The shots of the young girls going to the bathroom in pots lining the walls of the hallway made me very sad.  I have never heard of this exact story before and I do not think that text would properly show the lives of these children.  There are no smiles to be seen on these young women and the most emotion captured on their face was at their weekly shower.  I, too, one day, aspire to take photographs that tell such a vivid story.  Drake's photos are very close to the subject, but somehow, not intrusive.