The Pulitzer prizes were broadcast live from the journalism forum's website, and it shouldn't surprise anyone that the picture of the year was ... passed over.

Anyone want to take a gander of a guess as to why that was so?

Oh, they chose a winner, on the same topic, no less, Doug Mills of the New York Times, whose pictures were good, but epicly good, not photos for the ages.

But the really good one, by Evan Vucci of the Associated Press, didn't even make an honorable mention, or the final cut, let alone the winner's laurels.

Yet it was the iconic photo for the event, and the one that will be viewed for the ages.

The photo was so powerful there are artistic analyses about it on the internet, with talk about the rule of thirds and the golden mean, trying to parse out why that image seemed so eternal, so classical, so permanent.

Here's one from The Conversation:

In this photograph, Vucci is looking up with his camera. He makes Trump appear elevated as the central figure surrounded by suited Secret Service agents who shield his body. The agents form a triangular composition that places Trump at the vertex, slightly to the left of a raised American flag in the sky.

On the immediate right of Trump, an agent looks directly at Vucci’s lens with eyes concealed by dark glasses. The agent draws us into the image, he looks back at us, he sees the photographer and therefore, he seems to see us: he mirrors our gaze at the photograph. This figure is central, he leads our gaze to Trump’s raised fist.

Another point of note is that there are strong colour elements in this image that deceptively serve to pull it together as a photograph.

Set against a blue sky, everything else in the image is red, white and navy blue. The trickles of blood falling down Trump’s face are echoed in the red stripes of the American flag which aligns with the republican red of the podium in the lower left quadrant of the image.

But it wasn't good enough for the Pulitzer committee, which picked the work of someone else.

Might that be for this reason, noted by The Conversation at the bottom?

In Vucci’s photograph, we are given the illusion that this photograph captures “the moment” or “a shot”. Yet it doesn’t capture the moment of the shooting, but its immediate aftermath. The photograph captures Trump’s media acuity and swift, responsive performance to the attempted assassination, standing to rise with his fist in the air.

In a post-truth world, there has been a pervasive concern about knowing the truth. While that extends beyond photographic representation, photography and visual representation play a considerable part.

It made Trump look like the hero we know him to be, the decisive, swift-acting, self-sacrificing leader that voters had been looking for. The picture turned up on tshirts, coffee mugs, stickers and posters, signaling how much the public was moved by it. Of course he won the election.

Some must have blamed this photo for it. But it was hardly propaganda -- it was the work of an experienced photographer able to act with split-second instincts in a dangerous situation with events still unfolding. What's more Vucci was hardly buddies with Trump. In March, he testified against the White House exclusion of AP from the photo press pool over the 'Gulf of Mexico' being renamed the 'Gulf of America.'

Given Vucci's photos, it seems kind of counterintuitive for the White House to exclude Vucci over a dispute like that, but the Pulitzer board didn't notice.

I have no inside line on why this photo didn't win the Pulitzer, despite being so deserving of it. Did the AP not promote it, or did the Pulitzer board shun it, on what could only be political grounds. Either way, it's a disgrace. The photo had Pulitzer written all over it, and the judges could only view the thing through wokester-impaired eyes.

Image: X screen shot // fair use