A police officer edges cautiously through an abandoned house, his sidearm held up before him, ready to fire. Furniture is strewn about in disarray. At first glance, the scene looks familiar enough — a crime scene, a drug bust, the war on terror. But the caption for the black-and-white photo, which won top honors at the annual World Press Photo competition and is currently on show at the Eslite B2 Art Space, reveals a different story: the sheriff is “moving through a home in Cleveland, Ohio, following eviction as a result of mortgage foreclosure.”
The picture, taken by American photojournalist Anthony Suau for a photo-essay about the effects of the US financial crisis commissioned by Time magazine, was selected as the 52nd World Press Photo of the Year; the essay took second prize in the contest’s Daily Life category.
Suau’s entry achieves everything that the World Press Photo jury looks for in a top press photo — it asks questions of viewers and makes them want, or need, to delve more deeply into the story. Unlike last year’s winner — a picture of an exhausted US soldier in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley taken by Tim Hetherington — this year’s carries less of an immediate punch. Instead, it is full of complexity, and its impact is created gradually as you read through the caption, which, as always, is an integral part of this exhibition.
Suau’s win is remarkable as this is the second time that the veteran photojournalist has won the World Press Photo of the Year award. The first time was in 1987 for a photo of South Korean riots that flared up during elections.
Another election features prominently in this year’s
exhibition with Callie Shell’s series on the Obama campaign, also for Time magazine, which picked up first prize in the People in the News category.
Natural disaster and conflict play a prominent role in this show, as in every previous edition. The violent spat between Georgia and Russia and the Sichuan earthquake in China replaced Afghanistan and Iraq, which have been relegated to yesterday’s news, as popular subjects.
“All the stories on the conflict in Georgia show the very different ways that photographers work. You’ve got the real reportage, and then you have got a different photographer, same place, same time, who gives a totally different way of showing how he experienced it (the conflict),” said Femke van der Valk, the exhibition’s project manager, explaining why the conflagration appears in a number of the competition’s categories.
As for China, Van der Valk said she was very encouraged by the number of local photographers who won awards for their images of the Sichuan earthquake, which struck on May 12, 2008. “When something [newsworthy] happens, photographers from all over the world are flown to the place. And the ones with the best training, the best equipment and the ones who get paid best are likely to take the photos that get printed ... [In the exhibition this year, we see] Chinese photographers taking photos of their own country in a situation like this. We now see more and more that local photographers, when they have the right equipment and training, can win prizes for their own stories.”
The images of devastation are overwhelming at times, but overall, they form a minority. “Only 20 percent of the photos in the exhibition are about conflict,” Van der Valk said. “But these are the pictures people remember.”
Aside from the doom and gloom, the exhibition includes glorious images from fields such as science, sport and entertainment.
The Beijing Olympic Games were the subject of some wonderful sports photos, though one of the most amusing entries in the sports category is a series of pre- and post-fight portraits of boxers in New York.
Another highlight is large format prints of Steve Winter’s photos of a snow leopard taken in Hemis National Park in the Ladakh region of the Indian Himalayas. The complex quest to capture images of this shy and illusive creature involved months of stakeouts and hugely sophisticated equipment. The intricate planning for and execution of this project is a marked contrast to images captured on the fly, such as Sebastian D’Souza’s photo story of the Mumbai terrorist attack for the Mumbai Mirror, which received an honorable mention, or Lissette Lemus’ photo of a mother shot dead at her child’s primary school in El Salvador, which according to Van der Valk, came out of a routine commission for a story on education.
The World Press Photo contest grows larger each year; a total of 96,268 photos were submitted by 5,508 photographers from 124 countries for this edition. While not all the images make for comfortable viewing, there is plenty to think about in this outstanding slice of some of the best images from last year. A photo gallery and reports from the contest can be found at the World Press Photo Web site at www.worldpressphoto.org.
From censoring “poisonous books” to banning “poisonous languages,” the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) tried hard to stamp out anything that might conflict with its agenda during its almost 40 years of martial law. To mark 228 Peace Memorial Day, which commemorates the anti-government uprising in 1947, which was violently suppressed, I visited two exhibitions detailing censorship in Taiwan: “Silenced Pages” (禁書時代) at the National 228 Memorial Museum and “Mandarin Monopoly?!” (請說國語) at the National Human Rights Museum. In both cases, the authorities framed their targets as “evils that would threaten social mores, national stability and their anti-communist cause, justifying their actions
There is a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) plot to put millions at the mercy of the CCP using just released AI technology. This isn’t being overly dramatic. The speed at which AI is improving is exponential as AI improves itself, and we are unprepared for this because we have never experienced anything like this before. For example, a few months ago music videos made on home computers began appearing with AI-generated people and scenes in them that were pretty impressive, but the people would sprout extra arms and fingers, food would inexplicably fly off plates into mouths and text on
On the final approach to Lanshan Workstation (嵐山工作站), logging trains crossed one last gully over a dramatic double bridge, taking the left line to enter the locomotive shed or the right line to continue straight through, heading deeper into the Central Mountains. Today, hikers have to scramble down a steep slope into this gully and pass underneath the rails, still hanging eerily in the air even after the bridge’s supports collapsed long ago. It is the final — but not the most dangerous — challenge of a tough two-day hike in. Back when logging was still underway, it was a quick,
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislative caucus convener Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) and some in the deep blue camp seem determined to ensure many of the recall campaigns against their lawmakers succeed. Widely known as the “King of Hualien,” Fu also appears to have become the king of the KMT. In theory, Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) outranks him, but Han is supposed to be even-handed in negotiations between party caucuses — the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) says he is not — and Fu has been outright ignoring Han. Party Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) isn’t taking the lead on anything while Fu
RSS