World Press Photo, Danish Mads Nissen wins, three Italians on the podium

The World Press Photo Exhibition 2021 will be inaugurated on May 7 at Palazzo Madama in Turin. The exhibition will take place in Turin for the fifth consecutive year, thanks to the participation of CIME, a partner organization of the World Press Photo Foundation of Amsterdam and the Turin Museums Foundation. In addition to Turin, the exhibition will also be organized in 120 other cities in 50 countries, as every year. The exhibition will display the winning photographs of the World Press Photo, that is the most prestigious international photojournalism competition, launched for the first time in the mid-1950s by a group of Dutch journalists.

For 64 years, the contest has been collecting photos of thousands of photojournalists from major international newspapers, such as El Pais, the BBC, National Geographic, CNN and Le Monde. The photos presented are collected in eight categories each examined by eight commissions. The categories are: Contemporary Issues, Environment, General News, Long-Term Projects, Nature, Portraits, Sports and Spot News. Due to the pandemic, the evaluation of the candidate photos by the eight juries, chaired by the two photojournalists NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati and Muyi Xiao, took place online. The photographers competing this time were 4315 from 130 countries, who presented 74470 photographs.

Winning the World Press Photo of the Year title was the photo of the hug between Rosa Luizia Lunardi, an 85-year-old woman, and the nurse Adriana Silva da Costa Souza, taken by the Danish Mads Nissen in August 2020 in the Viva Bem nursing home, in Sao Paulo, Brazil. In the photo, the two women embrace through a plastic curtain. It is an invention of the staff of this nursing home. Due to the risk of contagion, an instruction was given to limit contact with the most fragile people such as the elderly to the bare essentials, and at the same time visits from relatives were prohibited. This curtain, reducing the risk of contagion, allowed this lady, like other people, to rediscover some human contact. It is a photo that reflects the situation in Brazil. Brazil is one of the countries where the coronavirus pandemic has hit the hardest, also due to the government’s management of Jair Bolsonaro, who has decided to underestimate the situation. The country is therefore one of those that paid the highest price: at the end of 2020 there had been more than 7 million cases and 195,000 deaths in the country.

Other prizes were also awarded in the competition, and three of these were awarded to Italians. The first is the World Press Photo Story of the Year 2021, an award that was won for the first time by an Italian. This is Antonio Faccilongo, a Roman journalist who presented a report for Getty Reportage, entitled Habibi, which in Arabic means “my love”. The report focuses on the more than 4,200 Palestinians imprisoned in Israeli prisons who are prevented from any contact with the outside, including conjugal visits. Some of these men, wanting to have children, have started smuggling their own semen. The photo shows a Palestinian woman lying on a sofa: she is the mother of one of the children born in this way.

The other prize won by an Italian is that of the “Stories-Unexpected News” section. This is a photo taken by Lorenzo Tugnoli, a photojournalist from Ravenna, who for the Contrasto agency told the effects of the terrible explosion that occurred at the port of Beirut on 4 August 2020. The explosion devastated the city causing the death of about 190 people. The photo shows a man wandering around the ruins.

Finally, there is the photo of Gabriele Galimberti, a Tuscan journalist who made a photo report for National Geographic in which it is said that the majority of weapons owned by individuals not for military purposes are located in America. The photo was awarded in the “Portraits” section, and shows a man shooting two jets of fire with flamethrowers, surrounded by dozens of rifles at his feet.