World Press Photo 2022 commemorates children who died in Canada

Red dresses hanging on roadside crosses in memory of aboriginal children who died in Canada: The mass grave of 215 children discovered in the city of Kamloops in the summer of 2021 won the global “World Press Photo” competition. It comes from Canadian Amber Brocken, as announced by the jury in Amsterdam on Thursday. 65,000 images were selected from more than 4,000 photographers from 130 countries.

Constantinople Sogalidis took the best single from Europe for the Bloomberg News. This shows the great wildfire that broke out in the summer of 2021 on the Greek island of Avia. The Canadian hit photo, published in the New York Times, shows crosses under dark skies with storm clouds and rainbows. “It was a quiet moment of global reckoning, with colonial history not only in Canada but around the world, and I could almost hear the stillness in this photo,” said Jury Chairman Rena Effendi. The discovery of the mass grave shocked Canada deeply. For decades, tribal children were forcibly enrolled in boarding schools for re-education.

The jury presented photos in various categories. Australian Matthew Abbott won with the best photo story: a series about the ancient tradition of the Australian aborigines burning land in a controlled manner to prevent uncontrolled bushfire. In the long-term projects category, Lalo de Almeida of Brazil won the series on endangered rainforests in the Amazon. Isadora Romero, an Ecuadorian photographer, won the award for her photographs on the effects of forced immigration.

The best photos of the award can be seen again this year at the “World Magazine Photography” exhibition at the Westlich Gallery in Vienna from September 9 to November 6. In the previous year, it attracted 28,500 visitors.

(Service -)