2023 Family Photojournalism Contests

The FPJA® hosts documentary family photography contests for professional members of the organization. 

These contests mark an important date for our organization in furthering our objective: To accredit and promote the expertise of professional family photographers who deploy a documentary-style to tell the story of the family.

In general, though, FPJA exists as a body of professional family photojournalists telling the authentic story of a family, not directing it. So we exclusively focus on the documentary-style work created for real clients...not photos of our own family members.

The FPJA contest judges have worked as staff picture desk editors at major news publications or are working photojournalists having won the highest news industry awards. Therefore, it is a natural progression for us to pool their talents to identify images with the same attributes as the high quality news images they work with on a daily basis.

From our deep roster of WPJA photojournalism judges, four will be selected for each of our contests. The FPJA staff will make a pre-pass of the entries to ensure that the judges are presented with strong documentary family work that will measure up to the elements of the good photojournalism they are used to seeing, a list not limited to creativity, composition, lighting, technical qualities, cropping, emotional appeal, and good moments.

The FPJA Documentary Family Photography Awards will be presented as follows:

Gold Medallions = All Four Judges Selected the Image

Blue Medallions = Three Judges Selected the Image

Purple Medallions = Two Judges Selected the Image

Winning images are placed in the Photo Award Galleries on the FPJA site, as well as the individual Member Profile Galleries.  Some will be uploaded to the FPJA Instagram and FPJA Facebook.

2023 Contest schedule 

v01 - Documentary Family | Birth

v02 - Documentary Family | Birth

v03 - Documentary Family | Birth