Knight' terse observation sums up the jury's task: they can evaluate a picture's quality, but not its theme. Objectivity is also required to place the winners into the contest's categories: tragic themes, quick to draw eyes, cannot enjoy an advantage. I put this to the text, standing in the centre of the main exhibition space in the Millenáris. I could see a good half of the images, suspended in the air on boards. Which image drew me first? A black and white photograph of a thin bearded man cradling a boy in his arms. The man's enormous eyes stare out from a darkened and contorted face as if to illuminate the picture, like a Rembrandt painting.
Yes, I too was attracted to the image of suffering, and not to a colourful one, but to a black and white one. The image is part of a series by the Hungarian photographer Balázs Gárdi, who took 1st Prize Singles in the General News category. It was taken in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley, one of the deadliest zones of conflict in the region. Gárdi also took 1st Prize Stories in the General News category for a series of photographs of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.
Interestingly, Gárdi's images are next to a series of colour photographs, also of Afghanistan, by Tim Hetherington. Though Hetherington's series only took 2nd Prize Stories in the General News Category, an image from the series of an exhausted U.S. soldier won the contest's top prize: World Press Photo of the Year.
World Press Photo is an independent non-profit organisation founded in the Netherlands in 1955 with the objective of supporting and promoting the work of professional photojournalists around the world. Over the years it has become a forum for photographic journalism in general, as well as a promoter of the free and unrestricted flow of information.
In achieving these aims, World Press Photo holds an annual photography competition, the largest and most prestigious in the world. Winning pictures are put on tour and are viewed by over a million people in thirty-five countries.
Author: Éva Mikes / Photo: Noémi Bruzák (MTI)
