The Prize Is the Bait — Who Actually Profits From the Photo-Contest Economy
Photographers are told a contest is a competition they enter and the organiser is a neutral judge of merit. Follow the money — from a one-man network of five fake-independent awards to the audited books of the field's most respected nonprofit, which took in €3.1 million one year and paid the winning photographers about €44,000 — and the same shape appears every time: value flows toward the institution, almost none flows back to the people who made the pictures. A money-and-power investigation into who collects the fees, who owns the contests collecting them, and why the entry fee is best understood not as a cost but as a business model, with the photographer as the customer.
