Photos Of The Year, As Chosen By Editor & Publisher

Editor & Publisher (www.editorandpublisher.com ) held its first Photo of the Year contest and more than 200 newspapers sent in over 1,000 entries. The winning photo was taken by Kevin Hoffman of The Mercury in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. There were four runners-up by circulation class and 16 other honorees. The only requirement was that the images were published in print or online between Nov 1, 1999 and Nov 1, 2000. The New York-based magazine's editors and art/design director judged the contest.

Kevin Hoffman was covering a high school lacrosse game for The Mercury in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, when he noticed smoke in the distance. He went back to his car, checked his police scanner, but heard no news. "The smoke was getting blacker and blacker," he says in an interview with PDNewswire. "I followed the smoke and saw two garages on fire." Running through a neighboring yard, Hoffman saw Soon Ea Endy running away from the garage holding a five-gallon kerosene can. Instinctively, he framed it and shot it. "She ran past me. It all happened really quickly," he says. "I shot two or three frames." He thought he'd caught the arsonist on film, but it was later found out that the woman was cooking fish in the garage.

The dramatic image ? of a woman fleeing the burning garage ? won Hoffman the contest and $500. He is proud of capturing that moment. "What's neat about it is that it beat out a lot of competition," he says. "This is a little hometown paper, this makes it more special. It's no overseas thing, it's no big name. We do that everyday here. We're running and gunning for spot news."

Denver-based photographer John Johnston can't leave his negatives alone. His unusual portrait of the president of the Denver Hearse Association was given an honorable mention in the E&P Photo of the Year contest. Using shots he had taken with his Hasselblad camera and an 80mm lens, Johnston cut up his negatives, scratched them with fine porcelain sandpaper, and stitched them back together with dental floss. The image is held together by scotch tape. He prints his own pictures.

Trained in art school, Johnston describes himself as more "hands-on" with his photography. "People get crazy when they see a nick on their picture," he says. "I take the opposite and I want to see how far I can go." He has cut, burnt, taped and experimented with his negatives. "I really don't know what I'll do till I cut up all my negatives," Johnston explains. For this picture, he cut his negatives into individual frames, put them on the light table and moved them around before selecting the ones he wanted.

He tends to shoot more film sometimes because he knows he will destroy some of them. "A lot of mistakes are good. I don't hold negatives as the most precious things in the world. Experimenting with them will only make things better."