When standing before the selected photos of the World Press Photo exhibit, on view at the Azzedine Alaia space in the Marais, it is impossible to divorce yourself from the graphic nature of the internationally-snapped selection of photos. Impossible in a way that, perhaps, you can with press photos that glut our daily lives in crumpled morning newspapers and distracted viewings of the evening news.
The foreign reporting that trickles into our lives often seems unfathomable for a cosmopolitan Western dweller to conceive of. War, savagery in the streets, fear of your neighbor, abject hunger—this exhibit brings the faraway chaos up close and personal, bringing other people’s daily realities into focus in a way that becomes heart-lurchingly tangible. We’re not talking “empathy.” This is about humanism rooted far more deeply than that: getting eye to eye with forceful realities that throw off the quotidian sense of what can and does exist. It will, in a word, stun. Stun in both senses– bewitch, and, moreover, shock.
The World Press Photography Contest has been ever-increasing in breadth since its inception, in 1955, in the Netherlands. It is a non-profit organization, holding the largest annual press photography contest in the world. The winning photographs are assembled into a traveling exhibit that tours 45 countries. The first photo to ever win the contest was by a Danish photographer, Mogens von Haven, who snapped a photo of a man dramatically—almost slap-stick in form— flipping off of his motorcycle.
Photographer: Mogens von Haven.
This year, over 100,000 submissions were entered into the contest. Each year a specialized panel evaluates and narrows down the winners from the pool of candidates. The vastness of the photographed experiences is broken down into ten loose categories within which there are first, second and third prizes and some honorable mentions, for series and single shots respectively. Below are but a few of the photos, mesmerizing both with visual artistry and arresting subject matter:
Photographer: Craig Golding (Category: Sports).
To be frank, I care very little about most sports. I hate team spirit, lycra, running, and whooping. I was not expecting to be wooed by the sports category. But Golding’s portrait of Jack Mathieson, a 91-year-old swimmer, made my heart melt. The man is close to a century old and he’d just swum 800 meters! Incredible. Even more incredible is how Golding somehow captured something about this senior that made him look like a… boy. For all his wrinkles, Mathieson is standing there with his wet hair plastered to his head, his goofy ears sticking out, his freckles dancing all over his body, and triumph in his bleary water-logged eyes.
Photographer: Stefani de Luigi (Category: Contemporary Issues).
The giraffe is such a vertical animal: its gangly grace is all about its elongated neck and lean legs. The sight of this horizontally-splayed giraffe is horrible. There is something almost ridiculous about it – it looks like it passed out drunk, or like it’s some kind of road kill. No: it is dying of thirst, neck curled powerlessly into the dirt of a dry African riverbed which had not seen rain in three years.
Photographer: Kees Van de Veen (Category: Arts and Entertainment).
This photo manages to be meta in an amazingly non-pretentious way. It’s a photograph of a woman (photographer Janna Bathoorn) snapping a picture of a seated man, behind which another man props up a pastoral tableau directly behind his head, as a trompe l’oeil background. The actual background is a gray clouded sky with an eerily menacing feel, wildflower strewn fields clear to the horizon, and a short clothesline of droopy laundry. The painted picture held behind the sitter is of a lush green field in which sheep roam and the sky is a lush blue.
There’s something wonderfully bittersweet about this juxtaposition of reality and fantasy – envisioning and projecting the circumstances you dream about to overshadow dreary reality, while equally representing disappointment about what is in front of you, having to resort to illusion when what you wish were real is not.
Photographer: Luca Santese (Category: Daily Life).
There is something almost painterly about this photo, maybe because of the mother-and-child trope and the prettily diffused light. In crime-ridden Detroit, this single mother is seen standing in her front yard, a lone figure looking across a fence that segregates her from the neighboring houses beyond it. A lurid red light emanates from her own doorway, and the grayish tinge of bricks and pallid sky creates an uninviting background to her life. Though the mother is vulnerable and alone in the sad landscape, her pale naked young son — with his cute tiny butt sagging over her forearm — is her family, and that they have each other provides a bit of hope.
Photographer: Mohammed Abed (Category: Spot News).
This photo is so, so horrifying I don’t really know what to say. When I first laid eyes on it, I wanted to make it unreal, I told myself “it looks like a broken, battered doll”. But it is not. She’s not a doll – it’s a little girl. A person, with her mouth ajar, and blood on her cheeks, and a halo of dirt around her head, which will never grow to be any bigger than the sharply edged rocks scattered nearby.
Photographer: Rina Castelnuovo (Category: General News).
This photo is perturbing not only because it is upsetting to witness the obvious aggression but also because it is so beautiful even as it is depicting an act of harassment that should squarely be considered ugly. The arc of the wine, unfurled mid-air is like a liquid crimson serpent, almost like some kind of party gag flung joke-ishly. The expression of the young boy slinging the contents of his drink from the flimsy plastic cup at this woman is completely unashamed, almost casual. Her face is completely hidden; only the swivel of her hips away from the boy shows her reaction.
It begs the question of what went on between them – if she provoked him in any way, if he’s so ravaged by anger and prejudice that his act is apropos of nothing. There is no small irony in the overlap of Arabic and Hebrew words — scribbled on that sea green panel above their heads — and the inability of rival cultures to communicate below.
Photographer: Farah Abdi Warsameh (Category: General News).
On most days with sweet blue skies, one often thinks to oneself, nothing bad could happen. But the blue sky as the backdrop to this savagery reveals a wretched, Nietzschian depiction of an apathetic universe. The baby blue sky seemingly fit for a picnic, instead hangs over horrific, rampant savagery of fourteen grown men pelting a fellow human creature to death. They’re punishing this man for having committed adultery.The right arm of the man in the right quadrant of the picture is fully extended, to maximize the momentum of his throw.
I’ve remained haunted by the man with the raised right arm, poised to chuck the malevolent meringue of a rock, ever since I saw this. He is the emblem of the most base unquenchable violence, ready to strike unmercifully, fueled by the zeal of his fundamentalist moral righteousness.
Winner of World Press Photo Contest, Photographer: Pietro Masturzo.
This was a controversial choice, which the selection panel readily admits, for the prestigious win. Masturzo’s photos are blurry, shadowy, their context as vague as the lighting. If you didn’t read the accompanying text, you might not see much value to them aesthetically.
Masturzo’s photos capture protesters in the night in Iran, anonymously yelling dissent from the rooftops after the unjust election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. This illicit, subversive behavior is enacted in the most punishing of circumstances, which in itself is a testament to the tirelessness of the human spirit: the belief that what is deserved will come forth, and that what is unearned needs to be called out, and that repression does not eviscerate dignity from people’s souls.
The spotlight on these subjects makes the viewer absorb the sorrows and hardships and triumphs of other corners of the world. You see what the photographer saw, a glimpse into unmentionable anguish or extraordinary circumstances; you are witness by transfer. The burdens and courage you see become the burdens and courage in your own existence. It is important to value this kind of reporting, this kind of information, and to be privy to the world at large, which we are so quick to forget amidst the minutia of our lives.
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The World Press Photo Contest is a traveling exhibition, showcasing worldwide.
For a full list of dates and venues for the 2010 tour, visit the World Press Photo website at: http://www.worldpressphoto.org.
The exhibition will be on view in Paris until June 17th, 2010.
Azzedine Alaia
18 rue de la Verrerie
Paris 75004
01 42 72 19 19
Metro: Hotel de Ville
