World Press Photo 2004
My colleague Ricardo was able to score some free tickets (because our company is one of the sponsors) to the World Press Photo 2004 exhibit going on now at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, so we went to check it out. It was quite good.
For those who are unfamiliar with the World Press Photo organization, it operates out of the Netherlands with patronage from the royal family. Its sole purpose is to promote the work of professional photojournalists. Each year it holds a contest to determine the best examples of photojournalism in the preceding year. This year’s jury had the daunting task of sorting through 63,093 entries from 4,176 photographers in 124 countries to select the pictures it felt were the most important. The best pictures in each of several categories make up the exhibit.
The winner was Jean-Marc Bouju’s now-famous picture of the hooded Iraqi man trying to comfort his terrified son. Other pictures from Iraq also featured prominently in the first half of the exhibit, as did a number of pictures taken of armed conflicts in other parts of the world (the spot news category was populated almost exclusively by pictures of people involved in some type of conflict).
As with the pictures from Iraq, much of the rest of the exhibit was a vast showcase for tragedies; among them were stories of villagers in China who have contracted AIDS from blood donations they made to earn money, women brought from Nigeria to work in the European sex industry, the story of a woman’s struggle with and eventual defeat by leukemia, and many others.
But there were also touching pictures, like those of the Russian acting troupe made up mostly of people with Down’s Syndrome or the ones of the Sierra Leone national amputee soccer team. And funny pictures, like the annual Twins Days festival in Ohio. There were also many pictures of amazing acts of nature, surprising feats of architecture, and of course, sports. There was no shortage of newsworthy events last year; this exhibit brings out the best and worst of them.
If you have a chance to see this exhibit, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.
You’ve sold me. I see it’s running till Aug 1 so we’ll check it out next week. Thanks for the tip.
Post a comment
Commenting is not available in this weblog entry.