For the twentieth consecutive year, the Photographic Social Vision Foundation organizes the World Press Photo exhibition at the Center de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB). The exhibition, which includes the photojournalistic works carried out mostly during 2023 and awarded by the contest jury, can be visited at the center’s facilities from November 8 to December 15.
This year World Press Photo, considered the most prestigious photojournalism contest in the world, has the Spanish Jaime Rojo (Madrid, 1981) among the winners, specifically in the category of Graphic Reporting of the North and Central American region, for his extensive work – developed over 20 years for National Geographic magazine – on the efforts to save monarch butterflies by communities in Canada, the United States and Mexico, countries through which this emblematic species migrates.
This edition exhibits a total of 129 photographs of the more than 61,000 that were submitted to the competition around the world. Its curator, the Mexican Martha Echevarría, explains that the topics addressed in World Press Photo 2024 are the environmental crisis, as well as the international war conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine or the humanitarian crises in Afghanistan or Ethiopia. It also highlights gender issues and mental illness care.
A very dangerous year for photojournalists
Carlos G. Vela, head of communications at Photographic Social Vision, celebrates that the Spanish edition is turning twenty years old and defines World Press Photo as “a means of being able to understand the world.” “In these two decades we have accumulated 1,550,000 spectators, with an annual average of more than 70,000 spectators per exhibition,” he reveals.
He also highlights that it is “a success because it fulfills a double mission: raising public awareness about global challenges and educating them visually.” Finally, he explains that more than 1,000 journalists have died in the last twenty years, and warns: “A democracy is not full if there is no photojournalist who can work freely.”
Echevarría adds to this warning, explaining that “the last year has been especially dangerous for photojournalists around the world.” In this sense, Echevarría highlights the photographer Mohamed Salem, author of the Photo of the Year award where a Palestinian woman from the Gaza Strip is seen hugging the shrouded corpse of her niece.
“Salem continues working in Gaza because he has not been able to leave,” says the police station and adds: “He already won the World Press Photo in 2010 for documenting attacks in Gaza by the Israeli army with white phosphorus.” Finally, Echevarría clarifies that the Photo of the Year is accompanied by two special mentions that give it context: “In one you can see an Israeli soldier after the Hamas attack on the Supernova festival on October 6, 2023; in the other, a Palestinian woman among the rubble of her house.”
The curator of the contest, born in the Netherlands in 1955, clarifies that the mentions are intended to “establish a comparison between the damage on one side and the other, and give context to the award-winning photo, which by itself does not have it despite its force”.
Monarch butterfly migration
“The path to the extinction of the monarch butterfly is a story that goes far beyond climate change,” explains Jaime Rojo, the Madrid photojournalist who stands out as one of the winners of the contest this year for the North and Central region. America. Rojo, who lives in Mexico, has been documenting the ups and downs of this species, emblematic in this country but also in the United States and Canada, for twenty years.
“The monarch butterfly has been in decline for four decades and I have personally witnessed this decline in populations, which used to be spectacular,” says the photographer, who adds: “One day I began to investigate the reasons.” Then he discovered that they encompass both global warming and industrial agriculture that destroys the flowers and plants that the caterpillar feeds on or capitalism that uses herbicides to optimize production.
He explains that the deforestation of its winter sanctuaries in the forests of Culiacán (Mexico) and the loss of its breeding habitat threaten this insect. Added to this is light pollution in cities, which can cause confusion between night and day, altering the patterns of when to fly and when to rest.
However, Rojo explains that he wanted his work to have a positive component. “As an environmental photojournalist I know well how easy it is to fall into depression and negativity; That is why I also wanted to tell the story of all the efforts that are being made to recover butterfly populations,” he explains. Thus, the images show activists from both Mexico, Canada and the American Midwest.
Other winners, from Venezuela to Türkiye
This year’s exhibition includes the 24 winning projects. In addition to the Photo of the Year, by Mohamed Salem, and the aforementioned report by Jaime Rojo, six honorable mentions are exhibited (one for each region of the contest) and the two special mentions.
The heartbreaking image of Mesut Hançer holding the hand of his 15-year-old daughter Irmak, who died in her sleep at her grandmother’s house, stands out. The building collapsed during an earthquake in southern Turkey. Kahramanmaraş, Türkiye, February 7, 2023.
Also notable is the work of Zied Ben Romdhane for Magnum Photos and Arab Fund for Arts and Culture, where he shows poverty in Tunisia with an image of young people watching a soccer game next to a chemical plant. For his part, Ebrahim Noroozi, of the Associated Press, displays a shocking photograph that shows a group of children staring hungry at an apple in a displaced persons camp in Afghanistan.
Other notable works are that of Lalo de Almeida for Folha de São Paulo, which shows drought in the Amazon. In the award-winning photograph you can see a fisherman who has to cross the bed of a dry tributary of the Amazon to reach his village, where he previously used to do so by boat. The proportion between the person and the bed gives an idea not only of the width of the river, but also of the dimension of the disaster, since it gives the impression that the fisherman is traveling through a desert.
Also captivating, among many others in World Press Photo 2024, is the photograph of a group of women in Punta de Mata (Venezuela), playing an outdoor board game while behind them the sky burns in the distance due to explosions of gas. It is part of the work that Adriana Loureiro Fernández did for The New York Times in which she aims to expose the decline of the Venezuelan oil industry, previously a symbol of pride and prosperity for the Caribbean country.
To finish, Martha Echevarría points out the work of Lee-Ann Olwage, for Geo magazine and awarded as Graphic Report of the Year. It is about mental health in the elderly in Africa, a new problem that has arisen with the increase in life expectancy in recent decades and that is posing a challenge for most countries.
#Saving #monarch #butterflies #showing #pain #Gaza #power #world #photojournalism
