Today we went to see an annual joint exhibition at the State Library of NSW; the World Press Photo 2011 exhibit (held as part of Canon's EOS Festival of Photography) and the Sydney Morning Herald Photos 1440 exhibit, featuring photojournalism from that newspaper. (1440 referring to the number of minutes in a day.)

In this shot we're seeing one part of the latter exhibition, including a video which featured the work of and interviews with some of the photojournalists.

To be honest I much preferred 1440 to WPP. I've been attending WPP exhibits for a few years now but I don't think I've previously encountered one with such a grim overall tone as this one. Yes, there are bad news stories around the world and those stories need to be told (and I'm well aware of the newspaper axiom of "If it bleeds, it leads"), but IMHO the judges leaned a little too far to the bleeding side of life this year. A shootout between two (possible) gang members in Brazil, the dead bodies (or parts thereof, including a severed head) resulting from drug wars in northern Mexico, the aftermath of earthquakes in Haiti (including one of a health worker tossing a corpse onto a pile of other bodies, with the corpse frozen in mid-air; certainly an image not easily forgotten), and so the themes go on. But the more optimistic, life affirming aspects of events around the world (big and small) are just as much part of the collective experience, and I think that previous years' exhibits have more fairly reflected that.

My vote for the People's Choice was for Irish photographer Andrew McConnell's shot of a woman in an area of great poverty in Kinshasa (Congo) practicing her cello. She makes her living by selling eggs, but also plays in Central Africa's only symphony orchestra. It doesn't avoid the reality of the situation, but it provides a balance of positive and negative. For me, it has an air of optimism and possibilities.

Similarly, I was probably drawn more to the 1440 exhibit because it focused more on living life rather than the brutal and/or ugly end of it. It had some aspects of tragedy, such as the floods which hit Queensland and Victoria (though these, while tragic for those affected, pale in comparison to many of the events covered in the WPP exhibit; Australia remains "the lucky country" in this respect), but also offers a window into the lives of "ordinary" people in "ordinary" places. Though it's an ordinariness that our own circle of experience may not normally let us see, and 1440 is valuable in that context.

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