'E&P' Photos of the Year Announced

By: Greg Mitchell It was the year of the embedded journalist, and a war that was slow in coming, brief in execution, and now, seemingly, never-ending. Not surprisingly, several of the prize winners in our fourth annual Photos of the Year contest offer haunting images from the war zone, and they won out over some tough competition. But there was plenty to laugh about, too, including an unusually high number of quality photos of children running, dancing, or hanging up the wash.

This year's contest drew wider interest than ever, with more than 600 entries in our three usual categories (news, features, sports), plus a new one, multiple images, in four circulation groups. The work of the 16 winners, one grand prize and 12 honorable mentions can be seen here at E&P Online. They will also be on display Oct. 30-Nov. 1 at the "PhotoPlus Expo" at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York. Holly Hughes, editor of our sister publication, Photo District News, helped us select this year's grand-prize winner.

Our top photographer, Jerome Delay, one of the few Western journalists who stayed in Baghdad throughout the run-up to war and American invasion, will pocket $1,000. Delay, who studied photojournalism at the University of Missouri, began freelancing for AP in Colorado in 1982, and joined its Jerusalem bureau in 1991. He went to Paris as international photo editor in 1996, and then to London in 2002. Along the way he covered conflicts in the Balkans, Africa and Afghanistan, as well as the Olympic Games and the World Cup.

Last October he arrived in Baghdad from his home in Paris on a short-term visa -- and ended up staying until April with only two short breaks. Despite the dangers, he tells E&P he never felt personally threatened and it was "a privilege to be there for such an extraordinary period." Delay likes to keep it simple and travel light, using one camera (a Canon 1D) and one lens (24 mm) for nearly every shot you see here.

As a non-embedded journalist, he attempted to capture the daily life of the Iraqis, what he calls "the other side of the Pentagon's coin." In this way he could undercut "demonization" -- the "preconceived notion that the Iraqis were all bloodthirsty baby killers" -- while at the same time showing how they had been victimized by Saddam Hussein. "It was the right decision by AP to keep me there," he says. How does he feel now about the dramatic changes he witnessed? "I still have a lot of questions about the war," he says. "Many of us who were there feel that way. Did we give the U.N. inspectors enough time? Anyone who was there before the war is not surprised by what has followed."