Butterfly wings, a touching fragile embrace against the great planetary fear of the virus. The photo of the year of the World Press Photo Award, the Dutch photographic Oscar, the most prestigious international photojournalist award, could only be a vision of the pandemic. But we also needed the right image, a photograph, according to the jury, which invited us to “look for a solution where there is a problem”. Among the nearly 75,000 photographs in the competition, sent by over four thousand photographers from all over the world, it was the Danish Mads Nissen who brought it. Title, “The first embrace”: 5 August 2020, in the Viva Bem nursing home in Sao Paulo, Brazil, the nurse Adriana Silva da Costa finally embraces, after five months of isolation, a guest, Rosa Luzia Lunardi, 89 years, through the yellow-edged wings of the protective plastic veil, the “curtain of hope”, which separates their bodies but not their feelings.
And the sea lion with the mask wins in the Environment category
“Vulnerability, love, separation, loss, but also survival, condensed into the symbol of a flight to hope”, explained juror Kevin WY Lee yesterday afternoon, on behalf of his colleagues, during the awards ceremony, which took place , of course, by videoconference. “In the worst crises, humanity shows its resources”, added the forty-two year old Nissen, third victory at the Wpp (he obtained the first prize also in 2011 and 2015). “I believe”, he commented from the sofa at home, surrounded by children, “that I have told a story of love and hope in a dramatic time and place”. Brazil has over 13 million cases of contagion and over three hundred thousand deaths. “When I heard that President Jair Bolsonaro called Covid ‘a simple flu’, I decided I would go to Brazil to tell a different story.”
World press photo, the photo of the year is the embrace between an elderly woman and a nurse
A photo of an 85-year-old Brazilian woman receiving her first hug in five months from a nurse through a transparent ‘hug curtain’ was named World Press Photo of the Year. captured the moment when Rosa Luzia Lunardi is embraced by nurse Adriana Silva da Costa Souza at the Viva Bem nursing home in Sao Paulo on August 5, 2020. Italian Antonio Faccilongo wins the history of the year award with ” Habibi “, a report on the smuggling of semen into Israeli prisons by Palestinian prisoners and their families
And there is also an Italian winner on the highest podium this year: Antonio Faccilongo, from Rome, his reportage entitled Habibi, “my love” in Arabic, won the “History of the Year” award. Faccilongo, reporter and university professor of photography, has been following the life and suffering of Palestinian families imprisoned in Israel for months, some for decades. “Their story has also become my story”, he told with great emotion in connection from home, “I was welcomed into one of those families, I know they are looking at me now, I hope this award makes more visible a drama ignored by the world, and serve to build bridges between cultures “.
Two other Italians have obtained first prizes in the categories in which the Wpp is divided. Lorenzo Tugnoli, already winner of a Pulitzer Prize (as well as among the six finalists of the main prize), won in the one of the “Spot News – Stories” with an extreme story from the explosion in the port of Beirut in August 2020. While Gabriele Galimberti he won in the “Portraits – Stories” category with a shocking series of portraits of American families proudly posing in their homes surrounded by their arsenals of weapons.
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