'I am very excited by the decision to honour a traditional style of photojournalism,' MaryAnne Golon, former director of photography at Time magazine and chair of this year's World Press Photo jury, told the BJP shortly after the winner was announced. 'This is an image that needs an explanation; you need to read the caption to understand that the picture is about the economic crisis.'

Other judges had similar praise for Anthony Suau's shot, which depicts Detective Robert Kole of the Cuyahoga County Sheriff's Department checking through a repossessed house in Cleveland, Ohio. Presenting the starkest view of life in America's economic underbelly, it's a subtle yet powerful image says Volker Lensch, a World Press juror and head of the photographic department at Stern magazine.

'Initially, we did have some reservations because it's a picture you have to look at for longer, read the caption and ask more about it,' he says. 'We thought people might not be satisfied with that because usually in World Press Photo, when you look at the picture you get it immediately. It's usually a touching picture or an action shot. But I think this is more intelligent than just a slap in the face. You have to think about it.'

David Friend, fellow juror and editor of creative development at Vanity Fair, echoes his words. 'Olivier Culmann (another jury member) called it low intensity story photojournalism,' he says. 'It's difficult to take dramatic pictures of this kind of issue. You have to read the caption to understand this photograph, but I think that's a positive.

The long view

For Friend, Suau's photograph was indicative of all of this year's finalists - the jury, he told BJP, chose 'deeper pictures' this time around. Michiel Munneke, managing director of World Press Photo, agrees. 'The choice of winning image is very interesting and brave,' he says. 'It's not the expected image, and it's an issue that's very hard to cover in an intelligent and interesting way. We've all seen pictures of worried people on Wall Street: this image is something different. It has many layers, and it captures what is really a very scary scene.'

He put the changes down to wider changes in photojournalism - specifically, the influence that the art market is exerting in this area. 'We have tried to include more jurors from the art world because more and more photographers are becoming active in that area,' he says. 'It's up to us to embrace that. It's about embracing these changes and creating a multidimensional response.'

But there are detractors. Per Folkver, editor-in-chief of Politiken, and Peter Bialobrzeski, a photographer and academic, both served on the first round jury, sifting through nearly 100,000 entries to create a large selection for the final judging panel. The images they saw, they say, were disappointing - and the winners even more so. 'Among the 96,268 images there were a few attempts at trying new approaches, but I don't see any of them in the final choices,' said Folkver. 'In fact, I find the lack of originality a little worrying.

'The photographic standards are very high, but the same things are being repeated again and again. I'm not talking about the spot news photos - they have to be taken while things are happening. I'm talking about subjects such as the Burning Man festival, drug addicts, men who want to be women, tattooed ladies, boxers before and after, children doing whatever. If you want to be a little rude, you can ask: "Yes we saw an awful lot of pictures, but did we also see a lot of good photography?"'

Conservative press

Folkver traces the trend to a conservative world media - photographers have little choice but to create conformist images, he argues, when newspapers and magazines publish little else. And, interestingly, World Press Photo winners have a habit of going unpublished - Tim Hetherington's 2007 shot didn't make Vanity Fair's print edit of his assignment, and Suau's image wasn't published in Time (although it made it into Time Online and was published elsewhere, notably Le Monde 2).

'The industry has changed dramatically over the last 22 years [when he last won the World Press],' says Suau. 'Magazines and newspapers had much better budgets then. It was a lot easier to get an assignment. Now it's very difficult. I had one assignment in the last two months, and that was the Obama inauguration. Even my stock sales have dropped. It's very frustrating for a lot of photographers because we know what's going on out there. We know there are places like Cleveland that are dying and we want to cover it, but it's very difficult to get funding to go there.

'Advertising revenues are falling,' he adds. 'At Time, MaryAnne Golon, Hillary Raskin and two other editors I've worked with for years have all taken redundancy packages. Many of them are still looking for jobs. It's frightening. I've never seen anything like it. And I have a good reputation - picture editors know me. I can't imagine what it is like for those people who aren't quite as well established.'

For Bialobrzeski, the problem lies with the contest. 'Does the contest represent the interesting stuff that was printed in 2008?' he asks. 'Well definitely not the stuff I look at. Where is Thomas Demand's reconstruction of the White House for the New York Times Magazine? Where is Alec Soth's essay on America, published in the Telegraph Magazine? The jury can only judge what is sent in.'

Even so, he remains appreciative of World Press' efforts. 'Editorial photography has broadened its language considerably, and this should be reflected in any "journalistic" competition. But this year's results, and the 2007 and 2006 finalists, embraced a surprising variety of visual languages,' he says. 'You can't have it all. It's a good start.'

Picture of the year

Anthony Suau's winning photograph shows Detective Robert Kole of the Cuyahoga County Sheriff's Department, moving carefully through a home in Cleveland, his eyes trained through the sights of a gun, following an eviction as a result of mortgage foreclosure. He took the image on his second trip to Cleveland after begging Time magazine to send him back to the city, in which he sees echoes of post-Katrina devastation.

'It was a little bit more than a year ago,' Suau tells BJP. 'It wasn't a huge story at that time, but it was already obvious that it would become critical. I had seen something about Cleveland in Paris Match in which the reporter compared it with New Orleans after the hurricane. At the time people didn't really know about it but when I got there, I was overwhelmed with what I found. There wasn't a single street without a house - sometimes five or ten - boarded up.'

On his first trip Suau worked for three days, from morning to night, but he thought there was much more to report. 'I suggested to Time that I go back,' he says. 'They wanted to look at other places in America, but I thought Cleveland was the epicentre. I proposed going out with the police officers charged with conducting evictions. So I went back and it was more intense than the first time. This time, I really got inside the story.'

For much of this time Suau followed Detective Kole who delivered, on most days, up to 20 eviction notices. 'When you drive up to these situations, you never know what you will find,' he says. 'At one point it was an old woman crying. She dropped in the detective's arms and cried, and when Kole went back to his car, he cried too. But other times, Kole told me, he faced people carrying weapons; they were ready for a standoff, refusing to leave.

'You deal with an enormous range of emotions. You have to be prepared for any situation.' In another house, Kole was called as back up after one of his colleagues smelled 'death' when he entered. 'There was a dead dog on a leash. The previous owner had left it to starve.'

The house in the winning photo used to belong to an old couple, according to the photographer. 'It had been vandalised, and we found evidence that vandals had taken a gun that used to belong to the couple,' he says. 'That gun was now on the streets of Cleveland.'

The houses are boarded up to prevent vandals from stripping away the copper of the plumbing and electrical systems, which can be a profitable source of income on the black market. 'It's a national disaster area,' says Suau. 'It can't get out of it without federal help. I was talking to security companies, who work for mortgage firms and they told me that this situation is repeating itself throughout the US. Detroit is lost; it's gone. Cleveland is on the fast track to becoming the new Detroit.

'At the time I would tell the other journalists to get out there and report on that story, but they didn't. By September and October, when the crisis really hit, they thought I was Nostradamus or something. But all they had to do was go out there and look.'

In the past Suau has covered conflict, and he won a Pulitzer Prize for his depiction of famine in Ethiopia. But, he says, photographing an economic disaster is far more complicated. 'It's important for a picture to elicit questions and to drive reader to the entire narrative; to see the full extent of the crisis. It's a challenge to cover an economic story, but it's great as it pushes you to touch ground that not a lot of photographers have touched on themselves. It's amazing if you get it right. When I made this picture, I knew that it was the one I was looking for.'