The ZIPA Story: Episode 2

Why We Built This At All

I still remember refreshing that results page, searching for my name, at least in the shortlist of a hundred photographers, if not the winners, only to feel disheartened later. All I received was a templated, generic email saying:

“The Wait Is Over! The XYZ Awards 2025 (name changed) Results Are Live! … Thank you for trusting us with your work. Your frames carried voices from everywhere, and together they became a chorus. We rise together, frame by frame.”

I wasn’t expecting any jury note or explanation for why my work hadn’t been selected. Given the huge number of entries award platforms receive from across the globe, that’s not very practical to implement anyway. Gradually, I understood, any contest, by its nature, is a process of mass elimination, since there will always be more entries than places on a list.

But something changed in me after that day. I started probing deeper into the judging process, the editorial philosophy, category definitions, and the anonymity of submissions, instead of believing every award was created equal and deserved my time, attention, and money.

So, when we formed ZIPA, we kept these core values in mind to stay honest and transparent about our judging process, evaluation criteria and how we read a particular submission category. We also decided that ZIPA should say this plainly: not making the cut is not a final verdict on the image, or an indicator of anyone’s true potential or talent.

Entry Fee I Still Regret Paying

One gnawing feeling that kept circling back to me was the exorbitant cost of entering the contest itself, even before a single frame is judged. I’d tracked what I spent chasing these awards in a year, and by December it had crossed a lakh, in Indian rupees, for a handful of honourable mentions and one Gold award in the travel category.

One number from last year that still catches me off guard: some of photography’s best-known “international” awards turned out to be run by the same parent company, just dressed up under different brand names. Digging further, I found this is their core business model, with twenty-one such awards (including in design and architecture) sitting in their original company portfolio. Enter a single professional photograph into all four of their photography awards, and you end up spending close to thirteen thousand Indian rupees, for the same image file, paid to the same business, just wearing four different brand names. I remember sitting with my own credit card statement that month, adding it up twice to be sure, and feeling almost foolish, a lawyer who reads fine print for a living, for not having asked this question years earlier.

This didn’t change anything for me as an artist, but it did change how I evaluate any such contest, and eventually shaped our vision for ZIPA. As a contestant, I now always weigh commercialisation and sponsorship aspect, when deciding credibility, independence, and institutional grounding of an award. As a founder of ZIPA, I try to infuse the same spirit of institutional grounding to this award.

Another pattern I could not quite explain to myself: why does the price of entering the same photograph change depending on which day you send it? An early-bird rate, a regular rate, sometimes a late rate higher still, for a picture that doesn’t get better or worse with the calendar. There may be tangible reasons like staff to schedule, administrative overhead, and the organisers are better placed than me to explain them. But if a submission is judged on the photograph alone, it’s fair to ask why what you pay to be judged should escalate depending on the date alone.

Our vision for ZIPA was always diversity and inclusivity, a lesson borrowed from the mandatory diversity and inclusion training most corporate employees go through. To advance this cause, we did not charge any entry fee for submission in ZIPA’s two editions so far. The idea was to keep participation open to photographers from every corner of the world and every rung of society, without any entry barriers. And if we decide to introduce an entry fee in future editions, it will be to cover running expenses, gallery fees, prints, website upkeep, promotions, and most importantly to nudge participants toward being more selective and thoughtful about what they send us. One photographer sending fifty to seventy image files adds nothing but administrative weight, with no visible improvement in the outcome.

Commercial or Institutional?

To us, the question was never really whether a fee exists. An entry fee pays for real things: administrative costs, human labour, printing, logistics, venue hire, honorariums for judges, to name a few. The real question is what an award genuinely exists for: to advance photography as a medium of expression and visual art, or to run as a business line built on an artist’s hope of being recognised. For most awards (except a few with real institutional roots like LensCulture, Eyeshot) a jury looks, decides, and moves on, and you don’t hear from them again until the next award cycle opens. That’s where the real difference lies, subtler than we usually admit, but living in the intent, in what an award actually contributes to the photography world and community once the award cycle comes to a closure. That’s exactly what we set out to change with ZIPA.

ZIPA is run purely out of our passion for photography, mostly self-funded. We do not have any business owner or investors to justify its existence in terms of revenue figures. We are not obliged to any sponsor either who may have even an iota of influence in the judging process or decision-making. The award has always been, and remains, a part of the institution we have built with this magazine, registered with the PRGI.

A list of winners is easy to publish and just as easy to forget by the following week. What we wanted instead was for each edition to leave people a little wiser about photography itself, not just informed about who placed where. So the results are a midpoint for us, not a finish line. Through Creative Zyne, winners and shortlisted photographers often get interviewed and featured long after results are out, their photographs becoming material for something longer: an editorial reflection, a feature in a book published years after, a conversation someone picks up months later. Winning is a milestone. What we care about more is what happens after, that’s the part that stays with a photographer. Once you’re part of ZIPA, you stay somewhere in our thinking.

The Problem of Plenty

Then there’s how a winner actually gets picked. Put five people in a room to agree on one image, and the photograph that wins is rarely the boldest one, it’s the one nobody strongly objects to. I’ve sat in that room, figuratively, watching a striking image lose ground the moment more than one juror’s score came in, scores that almost always favour the safer choice.

We started ZIPA to reward original ideas, bold images, rule-breaking compositions. Barring three categories in its second edition, every category is judged by a single expert in that genre, not a panel. Names and countries stay anonymous, even to whoever pre-screens the submissions, so that anonymity actually means something. Judging this way, however, carries its own cost too: a single juror and anonymous scoring mean there’s no consensus to hide behind if something goes wrong. That’s more accountability, not less.

The Invisible Cost We Pay for This Vision

While entering ZIPA remains free for participants, it isn’t free for me as a founder and editor of the magazine. Every running expense comes straight out of my own modest, hard-earned salary as a lawyer in an expensive city like Mumbai, sometime burning a hole in my pocket. This edition, thankfully, Lumix India stepped in to cover some of it.

But more than money, what it costs me is time: hours that would otherwise have gone to playing with my two-year-old twins, creating memories for years to come, an unhurried coffee with my wife, or a new photography book that might have grown my own vision instead.

I know none of this makes ZIPA the only award worth a photographer’s time. It just means we built the one we wished existed, back then, and I am glad all of you who ever sent your images for any edition of ZIPA, trusted us with that vision and responsibility to bring a small change in our own modest ways.

In the next and last episode of The ZIPA Story, we reveal what went behind the 2nd edition of ZIPA and how we pulled it off, despite unseen challenges waiting on our way.