Our goal is to showcase thought-provoking photos that call attention to our impact and inspire us to live sustainably. We expect these photos to be challenging and that many will raise tough, but important issues such as environmental racism and exploitation.
Our competition has a responsibility to promote robust, transparent, and ethically informed consent practices in photography. We believe that providing leadership and education on respect for the rights and dignity of all people represented in imagery is an essential part of our responsibility as a photography platform. We welcome and encourage feedback, if you would like to get in touch, you can reach us at epoty@ciwem.org.
This year we added a section to our competition rules concerning ethical practices in photography, and we introduced an ethics panel. The panel is active at two different stages within the competition proceedings.
We shared updated competition rules and guidelines with the panel, reviewed their comments and updated the rules and guidelines according to their recommendations. The ethics panel will be involved in the selection process after submissions close and before the judging panels receives any photos to review, where they will disqualify any photos that do not comply with our ethical standards.
Through this process we hope to ensure that any photos selected for publication have a robust grounding in ethical photography practices, and represent their subject matter with dignity and respect.