Latin America Contest & Program Announced

Nuestra Mirada and POYi co-sponsor visual journalism contest for March 2011

Pictures of the Year International (POYi) and Nuestra Mirada are partnering to produce the inaugural POYi Latin America Visual Journalism Contest and Fiesta de la Imagen to Ecuador March 14-18, 2011.

The contest will be hosted by the Universidad San Francisco de Quito and will be judged by a jury of renowned professionals and educators from throughout the Americas and Europe.  The 2011 competition will feature the work of Latin American journalists competing in a number of photographic categories. It is sponsored by Ecuador’s distinguished newspaper, El Universo with contributions from the University of Miami, Harvard University, Geo Magazine (Germany), Getty Images, The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas and Avanti.

The City of Cuenca, “Ecuador’s Cultural Capital,” will host the Fiesta de la Imagen in July 2011.  The weeklong event will include international guest speakers, seminars, workshops, exhibits and the POYi-Latin America Contest's Awards Ceremony.  Cuenca’s historical colonial city center, declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO, will provide an inspiring venue for this international cultural event.

Please check poyi.org and nuestramirada.org websites regularly for updated information as well as contest rules and deadlines.

Nuestra Mirada is the largest online network for photojournalists in Latin America.  It has more than 1,500 participating members representing every nation throughout the region.  In addition to publishing their work, Nuestra Mirada provides a forum in which photojournalists share information and ideas with their colleagues.  In January 2010 Nuestra Mirada released its first edition of an online magazine featuring stories from Argentina by some of the region’s most recognized photographers.  Nuestra Mirada, created in 2008, was made possible with the assistance of the Knight Center for International Media at the University of Miami.

Directors of the Project

The project directors, Loup Langton and Pablo Corral Vega, have been working together for two decades in Latin America to provide opportunities for visual journalists.  In addition to producing the best-selling photographic book, Discovering Ecuador & the Galapagos Islands, they have collaborated in several workshops throughout Latin America and spoken at numerous seminars.

Loup Langton, Director of the Visual Journalism Program at the University of Miami, has almost ten years of international experience as a photojournalist, editor and director of photography and twelve years as a professor of journalism. Langton’s book, Photojournalism and Today’s News (Wiley & Sons/Blackwell, 2009) is being used in classrooms internationally.  During 1998-99 he served as Director of Photography for El Universo, Ecuador’s largest newspaper.

Pablo Corral Vega is presently a Fellow with the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.  He is the creator and editor of Nuestra Mirada, his work has been published in National Geographic, National Geographic Traveler, the Smithsonian Magazine, the New York Times Sunday magazine, Audubon, the French, German, Spanish, and Russian editions of Geo, and other international reviews. Corral-Vega is the author of six books.