For the twentieth consecutive year, the Photographic Social Vision Foundation organizes the World Press Photo exhibition at the Barcelona Contemporary Culture Center (CCCB). The exhibition, which includes photojournalistic works mostly carried out during the year 2023 and awarded by the competition jury, can be visited in the center’s facilities from November 8 to December 15.
This year, the World Press Photo, considered the most prestigious photojournalism competition in the world, among the winners is the Spaniard Jaime Rojo (Madrid, 1981), notably in the Graphic Reporting category from the North and Central America region, for his in-depth work – developed over 20 years for National Geographic magazine – on efforts to save the monarch butterflies. by communities in Canada, the United States and Mexico, countries through which this emblematic species migrates.
This edition features a total of 129 photographs out of more than 61,000 submitted to the competition worldwide. Its curator, the Mexican Martha Echevarría, explains that the themes addressed in World Press Photo 2024 are the environmental crisis, as well as international war conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine or humanitarian crises in Afghanistan or Ethiopia. It also emphasizes gender issues and mental illness care.
A very dangerous year for photojournalists
Carlos G. Vela, communications manager of Photographic Social Vision, celebrates the twentieth anniversary of the Spanish edition and defines World Press Photo as “a way to understand the world”. “Over these two decades, we have accumulated 1,550,000 spectators, with an annual average of more than 70,000 spectators per exhibition,” he reveals.
He also emphasizes that it is “a success because it fulfills a double mission: to raise public awareness of global issues and to educate them visually”. Finally, he explains that more than 1,000 journalists have died in the last twenty years and warns: “A democracy is not full if there are no photojournalists who can work freely. »
Echevarría complements this warning by explaining that “the last year has been particularly dangerous for photojournalists around the world.” In this sense, Echevarría highlights the photographer Mohamed Salem, author of the Photo of the Year prize where we see a Palestinian woman from the Gaza Strip embracing the swaddled corpse of her niece.
“Salem continues to work in Gaza because he was unable to leave,” explains the police station, which adds: “He already won the World Press Photo in 2010 for having documented the white phosphorus attacks of Israeli army in Gaza.” Finally, Echevarría specifies that the Photo of the Year is accompanied by two special mentions that place it in context: “In one you can see an Israeli soldier after the Hamas attack on the Supernova festival on October 6, 2023 ; in the other, a Palestinian woman among the rubble of her house.
The competition commissioner, born in the Netherlands in 1955, specifies that the mentions aim to “establish a comparison between the damage on one side and the other, and to give context to the winning photo, which in itself- even has not despite his strength.
Migration of the monarch butterfly
“The path to extinction of the monarch butterfly is a story that goes well beyond climate change,” explains Jaime Rojo, the Madrid-based photojournalist who stands out this year as one of the winners of the competition for the North America region and Central. Rojo, who lives in Mexico, has been documenting the ups and downs of this iconic species in this country but also in the United States and Canada for twenty years.
“The monarch butterfly has been in decline for four decades and I have personally witnessed this decline in populations, which was once spectacular,” says the photographer, who adds: “One day, I started to research the reasons. ” Then he discovered that they include both global warming and industrial agriculture which destroys the flowers and plants on which the caterpillar feeds or capitalism which uses herbicides to optimize production.
He explains that the deforestation of its winter sanctuaries in the forests of Culiacán (Mexico) and the loss of its breeding habitat threaten this insect. Added to this is light pollution in cities, which can cause confusion between night and day, modifying flight and rest schedules.
However, Rojo explains that he wanted his work to have a positive component. “As an environmental photojournalist, I know well how easy it is to fall into depression and negativity; This is why I also wanted to tell about all the efforts that are being made to restore butterfly populations,” he explains. Thus, the images show activists from Mexico, Canada and the American Midwest.
Other winners, from Venezuela to Turkey
This year’s exhibition includes the 24 winning projects. In addition to the Photo of the Year, by Mohamed Salem, and the aforementioned report by Jaime Rojo, six honorable mentions (one for each region of the competition) and the two special mentions are on display.
The heartbreaking image of Mesut Hançer holding the hand of his 15-year-old daughter Irmak, who died in her sleep at her grandmother’s house, stands out. The building collapsed during an earthquake in southern Turkey. Kahramanmaraş, Türkiye, February 7, 2023.
Also noteworthy is the work of Zied Ben Romdhane for Magnum Photos and the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture, where he shows poverty in Tunisia with the image of young people watching a football match next to a chemical factory . Meanwhile, Ebrahim Noroozi of the Associated Press shows a shocking photo showing a group of hungry children staring at an apple in a displaced persons camp in Afghanistan.
Other notable works are those of Lalo de Almeida for Folha de São Paulo, which shows the drought in the Amazon. In the winning photograph, we can see a fisherman who must cross the bed of a dried-up tributary of the Amazon to reach his village, where he previously did so by boat. The proportion between the person and the bed gives an idea not only of the width of the river, but also of the dimension of the disaster, since it gives the impression that the fisherman is crossing a desert.
Also captivating, among many in the World Press Photo 2024, is a photograph of a group of women in Punta de Mata (Venezuela), playing an outdoor board game while behind them the sky burns in the distance due to gas explosions. This is part of the work that Adriana Loureiro Fernández has carried out for the New York Times in which she aims to denounce the decline of the Venezuelan oil industry, previously a symbol of pride and prosperity for this Caribbean country.
Finally, Martha Echevarría highlights the work of Lee-Ann Olwage, for Geo magazine and awarded Graphic Report of the Year. This is the mental health of older people in Africa, a new problem that has emerged with the increase in life expectancy in recent decades and which constitutes a challenge for most countries.
