World Press Photo 2022, the best photos of the year tell the story of the wounds of the world

The winners of the World Press Photo, the world‘s premier photojournalism award, were announced today. This year, unlike previous editions, there are four winners, in four different categories: best photo, best photographic story, best long-term project, and best free-format project.

The winners were chosen from more than 65,000 shots submitted to the jury, from 4066 photographers from 130 different countries. From the climate crisis to social unrest, from Covid to the wounds of collective memory: more than ever this year the award has selected photographs that show the fragility of our world.

In addition to the four main projects, prizes were also awarded in some categories divided by theme and by region of origin of the shots. All the winning shots in this 66th edition of the World Press Photo will be on display both at the Gam in Turin from 29 April to 18 September and at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome from 28 April to 12 June. From 15 April, however, the world premiere of the exhibition will be open to visitors at De Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. The world tour of the shots will then touch 66 locations in 29 countries.

The most important category, that of the best photo, was won by Amber Bracken of the New York Times, with a shot taken in British Columbia, Canada: a rainbow peeks out on the horizon, while in the foreground we see red dresses hanging on crosses wooden.

We are in British Columbia and the crosses mark the place where the victims of the Kamloops Indian Residential School were found, a Catholic school that at the turn of the twentieth century housed young Canadian indigenous people. In recent years, after investigations and reconstructions, confirmation has come that many children who attended the institution were being mistreated and abused. In May 2021, 215 bodies were found buried.

The president of the jury, Rena Effendi, motivated the choice as follows: «It is a type of image that creeps into memory, inspires a sort of sensory reaction. I could almost feel the stillness in this photograph, a peaceful moment of global showdown for the history of colonization, not just in Canada but around the world. “

Il premio “World Press Photo Story of the Year” went to Matthew Abbott’s “Saving the Forests with Fire”, Australia, a work made for National Geographic / Panos Pictures. At the center of the story, a rite of the Australian natives who strategically burn the earth in a practice known as “cold combustion”: the fires move slowly, burn only the undergrowth and remove the accumulation of plant residues that can fuel larger fires . The Nawarddeken people of West Arnhem Land, Australia have been practicing this practice for tens of thousands of years and see fire as a tool to manage their 1.39 million hectare homeland. Warddeken rangers combine traditional knowledge with contemporary technologies to prevent fires, thereby decreasing CO2 for global warming.

Award winner “World Press Photo long-term project award”instead, “Amazonian dystopia” by Lalo de Almeida, Brazil, for Folha de São Paulo / Panos Pictures. It shows how the Amazon rainforest is severely threatened by deforestation, mining, infrastructure development and the exploitation of other natural resources. The “little green” policies of President Jair Bolsonaro also weigh heavily.

“Blood is a seed” by Isadora Romero, Ecuador won the video section, “World Press Photo open format award”. Through personal stories, this work questions the disappearance of seeds, forced migration, colonization and the consequent loss of ancestral knowledge. The video consists of digital and film photographs, some of which were shot on expired 35mm film and subsequently drawn by Romero’s father. On a trip to their ancestral village of Une, Cundinamarca, Colombia, Romero explores forgotten memories of the land and crops and learns that his grandfather and great-grandmother were “seed keepers” and that they grew different varieties of potatoes. , of which only two can still be found.