In an era where images are forgotten with a single story and post, further drowned in the addictive infinite scroll, the World Press Photo reasserts itself as a moment of pause to forget the mobile and remember to think about photographs, far from the fast food served by social networks. The exhibition with the best photojournalism works in the world returns to the CCCB until December 17. Stopping in more than 90 cities, the exhibition reaches a global audience of four million attendees.
The exhibition, organized by the Photographic Social Vision Foundation, consists of more than 110 photographs, portraying everything that happens in the world and often goes unseen, always with a strong emphasis on armed conflicts, migrations, and social inequalities, but also giving climate change an increasingly prominent role. In addition, with a marked feminine accent, with a mother who cannot protect her son from the diseases caused by the excessive use of pesticides in Villa Guerrero, Mexico, seen by Cristopher Rogel Blanquet, or the women who are locked up in Ghana when they age and suffer from dementia living in a society unfamiliar with these symptoms and considering them witches, portrayed by Lee-Ann Olwage.
Starting the tour through the CCCB, water stands out as a common thread of many concerns in different latitudes such as Australia, Egypt, the United States, Morocco, or Peru. For two editions now, the World Press Photo includes a new category, that of open format, in which photography stretches its borders to try new languages. So much so that this year it has been won by someone completely outside the sector like Chad Ajamian, a geographic information scientist who dedicated himself to capturing infrared aerial images of terrains that were completely devastated after strong floods, turning them into artistic with the use of saturated colors. At the awards ceremony, held in Amsterdam, Ajamian knew no one from the photojournalism world and didn't know who to talk to.
On the outskirts of Alexandria, a fishing village is disappearing with rising sea levels. Also in the open format category, Mohamed Mahdy wanted to preserve their memory as the government expels them and demolishes their homes. As messages in bottles were found there, the photojournalist encouraged the former inhabitants of Al Max to send their letters in a collaborative installation that grows day by day. On the other hand, sometimes, it is not due to an excess of water but its lack that endangers communities, such as farmers who are running out of oases in Morocco. M'hammed Kilito has chosen subdued colors to portray a territory that is losing its life.
Nature manifests itself in the photographic contest from other points of view. Through endearing alpacas, Alessandro Cinque narrates how the Peruvian Andes are seeing one of their main sources of income endangered, with rising temperatures forcing alpaca herders to move higher up while these mammals, with highly prized meat and wool, grow. Cinque not only points out the problem but also shows the scientific research being carried out to create a new species more resistant to extreme temperatures.
The World Press Photo 2023, with photographs from a year ago and having received more than 60,000 works, could not but be dominated by the war in Ukraine. The photograph of the year goes to the bombing of a hospital in Mariupol by photographer Evgeniy Maloletka, with a wounded pregnant mother who has just lost her baby and will also die shortly after. Very close by is the scream of a daughter with her dead father while he was going to buy bread by Alkis Konstantinidis. Special mention for photographer 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.
Besides portraying what is happening, the World Press Photo often becomes a kind of diviner of what is to come. The exhibition displays the winners from the previous year, but many of the conflicts being experienced in the present were already anticipated. In the 2022 exhibition, there was a decapitated Lenin statue in Ukraine that many thought corresponded to the war with Russia, but it was part of a broad retrospective made between 2013 and 2021. This year, Maya Levin documents the riots that occurred at the funeral of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in Jerusalem, when there was still much time before the escalation of the conflict being experienced today in Gaza.
It not only anticipates, but also remembers. One more year, Afghanistan reappears among the winners of the contest, when the West has already completely forgotten it. Mads Nissen describes the hardships under the Taliban regime, showing the consequences of abandonment, with children victims of hunger and organ trafficking. There is also space for Iran and the protests that broke out after the death of Mahsa Amini, causing a historic rebellion among women who defy authority and do not wear a veil in the street, something unthinkable very recently, as shown by Ahmad Halabisaz.
And, above all, the World Press Photo continues to bother. The series by Hannah Reyes Morales about the elderly LGTBI community in the Philippines has been a victim of something as old as censorship. Hungary, governed by the nationalist conservative Viktor Orbán, prohibited minors from entering the exhibition, to prevent them from seeing images in which people protect themselves from discrimination and try to live as best they can.