'E&P' Names 3rd Annual Photos Of the Year

By: Greg Mitchell From wildfires out West to sniper shootings in the East, it's been a stressful year, and most of the winning entries in our annual photo contest reflect this, brilliantly. There hasn't been much to laugh about since Sept. 11 of last year, but press photographers, as usual, have spotted moving or revealing images in the darkness.

This year's contest drew wider interest than ever, with more than 500 entries in three categories (news, features, sports) and four circulation groups. Thirteen winners were chosen, in addition to honorable mentions. All of these pictures will be on display Oct. 31-Nov. 2 at Photo District News' "PhotoPlus Expo" at the Javits Convention Center in New York. This year, for the first time, two editors from Photo District News, our sibling VNU publication, joined us in selecting the grand prize, or Photo of the Year.

To see all the winners, click here.

Our winning photographer will pocket $500. Laura Rauch, a native of Kansas City, Mo., went to j-school nearby at the University of Kansas. A photojournalist for 15 years, she worked for Knight Ridder papers in Colorado and Kansas before joining The Associated Press in 1999. Her assignments have taken her to more than 30 countries, but she also has covered a lot of boxing (she now lives in Las Vegas) and counts as her favorite assignment the 2000 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. She now serves as AP western regional photographer.

Although her interests are varied, Rauch felt she was a natural for Central Asian duty last fall. "I felt like I knew that story," she tells E&P. She had already spent a fair amount of time in the region, from a long vacation in Pakistan (where she still had friends) to climbing the Himalayas. And she was no stranger to a war zone, having covered the Bosnian conflict in the mid-1990s for Knight Ridder. AP sent her to Pakistan in October and then to Kabul in November after the fall of the Taliban, the first female AP photographer to arrive. "It was a lawless time," she says, "which made it a good time to get across the border." An AP photographer had already been shot and wounded in Afghanistan, however.

In Kabul, she photographed refugee camps and orphanages. When she covered a large group of Afghan widows gathering to receive rations, she spotted one woman happily raising her burka, and took the winning digital photo using her Nikon D-1 camera (ASA 200, 500/f4.) "I still don't know her name," Rauch says, "but I felt I connected with her. It was as if she was saying, 'I'm like you, I'm a strong woman' -- but she was still timid about it, so she kept her hand up." Later, when Rauch looked at her photos, she noticed that the woman held her hand partly in front of her face in every one.