Years go by and it seems that nothing has changed, that everything was there and it was preferred not to look at it. The World Press Photo contest celebrates 20 years since its first exhibition in Barcelona, having attracted more than 1.65 million spectators. A chronology welcomes this year's exhibition at the CCCB, collecting the best images from each year since they could be seen in the Catalan capital. There are conflicts more current than ever like Israel against Gaza and Lebanon, but also Russia and Afghanistan, with some photographs that escape from wars and look at evictions, climate disasters and migrations. "These are the photographs from history books," summarizes the curator of the itinerant exhibition, Marta Echevarría.
The only Spanish photographer who sneaks among the winners of the last two decades is Samuel Aranda (Santa Coloma de Gramenet, 1975), with a mother embracing her wounded son in Yemen. It looks a lot like this year's winner, which this time happens in Gaza, with another woman holding the lifeless body of her niece. A Palestinian Woman by Mohammed Salem portrays the loss after a missile killed four members of Inas Abu Maamar's family in Khan Yunis, in the south of the Gaza Strip. A total of 129 photographs make up this year's exhibition, organized by the Photographic Social Vision Foundation, selected from the 61,000 works that almost 4,000 photographers submitted to the 2024 edition of the photographic contest.
Salem's photograph, who already won the World Press Photo in 2010 for the image of white phosphorus attacks in Gaza, is accompanied by two more about the war that has put the Middle East in check since October 7, 2023. On one side, the consequences of the Hamas attack on the Supernova music festival, by Leon Neal, on a day when 1,200 people died and 250 were kidnapped in Israel, while, on the other side, the destruction of one of the many Israeli bombings on Gaza, by Mustafa Hassouna, already exceeding more than 40,000 dead.
The war in Ukraine is still present in the World Press Photo exhibition, which can be seen until December 15, but it has lost the absolute prominence of last year, when the photograph of the year went to Evgeniy Maloletka for his portrait of the bombing of a hospital in Mariupol, with a wounded pregnant mother who had just lost her baby and shortly after she also died. Also featured were snapshots by Alkis Konstantinidis and Emilio Morenatti, based in Barcelona, with a very personal work on victims who have a leg amputated, as happened to him covering the war in Afghanistan.
This year Ukraine appears in the open format category, with a multidisciplinary proposal that mixes images, music and text messages as if it were a personal diary by Julia Kochetova. Also portrayed were the floods in Kherson after several explosions that damaged the Kakhovka dam, by Johanna Maria Fritz, with flooded streets and absent houses, an image that now does not seem so distant after the tragedy in Valencia.
But there are more wars like the one in Myanmar and then there is what comes after, as with Ethiopia, in the Tigray region, with its end portrayed by Vincent Haiges, when a soldier returns home and greets his mother. Without forgetting the sexual victims left by a conflict that has lasted for two years, seen by Arlette Bashizi. Journalists are one of the groups that are in the spotlight in wars and, with 2023 being the year in which more professionals died in the last two decades, World Press Photo includes a tribute to all victims in the exhibition. From 2005 until last year, more than 1,000 journalists have been killed worldwide.
In a world that seems increasingly violent, the climate emergency strikes harder and gains weight in the World Press Photo. The list of disasters expands day by day and spreads throughout the world, with drought leaving the Amazon River without water and the ocean eating away at the land in Australia, seen by Lalo de Almeida and Eddie Jim, respectively. And the United States already has its first climate refugees, as reported by Sandra Mehl, with Jean-Charles Island sinking and its last inhabitants having to be relocated. One of the most impactful snapshots this year is by Adem Altan, about the earthquake that affected Turkey and Syria, with a father holding the hand of his dead daughter, trapped among rubble.
This year's Spanish contribution is signed by Jaime Rojo (Madrid, 1981) with his study on the monarch butterfly, whose population is rapidly decreasing. "I am a rara avis in the World Press Photo," he says about his portrait of an insect with which he wants to talk about much more, "climate change affects us all, we cannot turn our backs on nature." Curiously, Rena Effendi's series also features butterflies, as she searches for the satyrus butterfly in the war-devastated area between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
In the photography contest, mental health is also gaining more and more space. Lee-Ann Olwage repeats this year after being present last year with the women who are locked up in Ghana when they suffer from dementia in a society unfamiliar with these symptoms and considers them witches. She returns to portray dementia, this time in Madagascar, with the daily life of a family caring for their sick grandfather for years, going to mass or getting dressed. Kazuhiko Matsumura puts the same focus on Kyoto, with a daring proposal that portrays the loneliness and helplessness of those who suffer from it. The chapter is completed by Wang Naigong's view of a cancer patient and her family when she dies, with a portrait that imagines what all the members would be like when she is gone.