‘The raw power’: Wikimedia’s newest Picture of the Year
Photo of an Indonesian bull race is crowned after a multi-round vote by thousands of volunteer contributors from around the globe.
The scene is remarkable: two bulls scrabble for footing, sending mud flying everywhere, as they race down a rice field. Behind them, a solitary man is holding onto harnesses for dear life.
(Left unseen is the person behind the camera, standing directly in the path of the bulls.)
Welcome to the newest Wikimedia Picture of the Year, the winner of an annual competition run since 2006.* After over 9,000 votes were cast in the final round of the multi-stage contest, Rodney Ee won first place for an arresting photo of a traditional Indonesian bull race (pacu jawi) in Tanah Datar, West Sumatra.
Just behind Ee’s photo were the second- and third-place winners: a haunting capture of the soon-to-be fiery end of the spire of Notre-Dame and a portrait of a young Kurdish woman celebrating Nowruz (respectively).
I got in touch with all three winners to learn more.
Perhaps ironically, Ee was inspired to create this photo years ago after seeing bull-racing win a different photo contest. Prior to traveling from their home in Singapore to West Sumatra, one of the provinces of Indonesia, Ee researched the event through freely available YouTube videos.
“I figured that in order to get a close up shot of the action I needed a really long zoom (and a monopod for stability),” they told me, “and just for my protection, I probably needed travel insurance too!”
Ee tried shooting race heats from several different angles but determined that the head-on shots were the most appealing. With very little time to take the photos and run out of the way, getting the perfect shot took quite a bit of time — but as the races were run over and over, Ee had plenty of chances to get it right.
“I really wanted to capture the raw power and the energy of the bulls,” Ee says, “and I feel I managed to do that.”
Coming in second place in the competition was Guillaume Levrier’s vignette of the fire-stricken spire of Notre-Dame cathedral, which collapsed only a few minutes after this photo was taken. Levrier captured around 25 photos from a bridge between Île Saint-Louis, a river island in Paris, and Île de la Cité, another river island on which the cathedral was built.
Levrier told me:
The police had already denied access to the streets when I arrived, and I couldn’t stay for more than 10 minutes, as they pushed us back to Île Saint Louis and closed the bridge. We could feel that the spire would fall soon-ish, in a matter of minutes rather than hours. But there was also a feeling that the public authorities needed room to operate. So I left the scene and headed back home.
Finally, the third-place prize went to Salar Arkan’s portrait of a young torch-bearing Kurdish woman ascending a hill as part of the first day of Nowruz. As practiced by Kurds, Nowruz celebrates the defeat of the Assyrian tyrant Zuhak; the colored clothes are part of the celebration, and the lit torch is a symbol of the Kurds’ freedom.
This particular photo was taken near sunset in Palangan, Iran, a rural village situated between two mountains. “I remember it was a windy day, Arkan says, “and I was at the top of the village … [then] all of the sudden I saw a girl with [a] beautiful dress and a coiny hat.”
* Photos of the year are selected from the preceding calendar year’s worth of new “featured” pictures, a marker of high quality awarded after a community vetting process. You can see all of the previous pictures of the year on Wikimedia Commons, a freely licensed repository for educational media content; it hosts most of the images used on Wikipedia.
