By some crazy fluke whilst walking down the road on the first day in Vienna I came across a semi ripped poster on a electricity pole, and it was advertising a gallery showcasing the World Press Photo 2010 winners. The World Press Photo awards are the most prestigious award a photojournalist can get. The winners are usually from such photo agencies as Getty/Reuters/AFP, which kind of shows the calibre.

This year was quite special because my favourite photographer, Liz Kreutz, won 1st prize in ‘Sports Features – Stories’. I originally noticed Liz’s work because she was the team photographer for the USPS cycling team (Lance Armstrong’s team). She then went on through its various incarnations as Discovery Channel, Astana and later RadioShack. I guess you could say I was only a fan of hers at the start because she had the best access for photos of Lance, and posted quite a bit of stuff on Twitter. But her cycling photos are actually just damned good, and they have a photojournalism angle to them which most others don’t. It is also great to see a woman working in a completely male dominated area of photography. Im still annoyed with myself though from when I was in Monaco the day before the start of the 2009 Tour de France and I walked straight past her, only realising later hey that was Liz Kreutz. So as you probably guessed it, the ‘story’ she portrayed in her images was Lance’s second comeback to professional cycling and his bid for an 8th Tour de France.

The exhibition was really awesome. Surprisingly I don’t think ive ever gone to a photography gallery before, i haven’t ever cared enough about anyones work to bother. But this was really cool. These photos are the best of the best, and this is where a photographer aspires to be, on these walls. They even had stations of imacs setup with videos from the photographers and all the information, it was really well setup. You can see all the images in Liz’s entry here. When I left I asked if they had the book (has every photo and captions etc) in English, the girl said no. Then one of the other girls corrected her and said they did, and she looked around for a while, and yes they had three copies of it in English. Score. Continue for some pics.