Scandals and Difficulties in Photography Competitions

In the post ‘What is a good photograph?’ I have offered an option of submitting photos to photography contests to have your photos evaluated by professionals.

The point is that most photography contests are economic businesses. As the total income of each contest usually exceeds the total sum of its prizes, many photo contests are first and foremost a good source of income to their owners. They should therefore be looked at with some suspicion. Yet, in the end, the value of a competition is measured by its credibility, by the quality of the photographs that are submitted, which is almost always very high in this era of wealth of accessibility and photographic opportunities, and by the quality of its curators and judges.

Speaking of caution, I recently came across some fascinating information about an alleged fraud by a network of photo contests all led by one enigmatic and mysterious man named Martin Stavars, whose identity is not entirely clear, and who runs several photo contest websites such as International Photography of the Year, Monochrome Awards, ND Awards, Fine Art Photography Awards, and Monovisions Photography Awards. This fact alone can cause some discomfort – although we will soon see that this is not always a problem.

Concern arose when some judges in these competitions publicly had raised the claim that they were registered as judges, but did not see even one photograph from the competition until after the winners were announced. Hence the suspicion arose that Stavars himself was the one who decided upon the winners, and not the referees (photographers or curators), some of whom are highly regarded professionals.

I will not go into details. Those who are interested, can find them on the PetaPixel website, the PDN website and the DPReview website. They all are interesting to read.

I discovered this information when I was thinking of entering the ND Awards photo contest, but something there seemed unreliable to me. I checked these sites a little deeper, and found that my precaution was justified.At the same time – I discovered that sometimes the opposite is also true. That is, I found out about the existence of another network of photo contest websites, also managed by a single person, but seems to be reliable and very well respected. The owner of this photo contests websites is Hossein Farmani, born in Tehran and living in the United States. He studied photography and cinematography, worked in advertising, and over time invested a lot in voluntary activities to promote AIDS research and the art of photography. I could see the connection between the different photography contests he owns by the similar login and submission platforms. And yet, even though they are all under one framework, these competitions seem to be legitimate photo contests, the judges in them are known, some are very well known, and the person at their head is visible to the public eye.

While I was wondering about the complexity, the business, the art and the legitimacy of the various photography contests, and above all – the legitimacy of the goal of their founders, I found only the other day that I won another award in the most prestigious among the Farmani Group’s contests, IPA – International Photography Awards. This time it was under the category: Advertising – Self Promotion.

The photograph, which is the leading photograph of this post, is one of a series of photographs I took from trains in motion. To shot this photograph using a slow shutter speed through a train’s window in one of Tel Aviv’s train stations. I have uploaded some other photographs from this series into my gallery ‘Training’

This post was first published on my Hebrew blog on October 25^th, 2021.