I recently entered the 2025 New York Times Portfolio Review, which was free. It’s simple: You submit 10 photos, if you make the cut those photos will be critiqued by four or five judges. I didn’t make the cut, alas.
Why not? I don’t know, they didn’t say. Which is par for the course for these things.
My guess is that it went something like this: They received 2500 applicants for 160 slots. I don’t know the actual procedure, but whatever it was, I suspect that, in effect, they divided the entries into two piles, possibles, and rejects. They then had to choose among the possibles. I’m sure they did that as carefully as possible, but they might as well have done it randomly. The future will tell whether or not they may the right selection. And here’s the tricky part, the selection they made was an initial step in determining that future.
I have no idea who entered, but anyone could do so. I would think that most unknowns would take a deep breath before entering, but surely there were some entrants who had no business entering their photos. Mostly likely all of them ended up in the reject pile. But there were others in the reject pile as well. How large was the reject pile? I don’t know. Maybe 1000, less than half, maybe 2000, considerably more than half. Who knows. However large the pile of possibles, I’m guessing that they were all of roughly the same quality. THAT’s why I said choosing the actual entrants from that group was essentially arbitrary. Reasons were no doubt given, in the minds of the judges, perhaps on score sheets of some kind, and they were “real,” but also arbitrary, ex post facto rationalizations.
Why am I leaving it up to the future to sort things out? I’m not saying that there were no worthwhile differences among the possibles. Not at all. What I’m saying is that we don’t know, at this time, what those differences are.
I have much the same problem with my own photos. Beyond a certain point, I don’t know which ones are better than the others. I can’t tell. I’ve not yet trained myself to make such a discrimination.
