Khalil’s kidney, the dead of Mariupol and the most shocking photos of a world on a war footing

2023-11-09 17:56:43

Khalil looks at the camera, but his eyes, very sad, are actually pure emptiness. The nothing. The explanation, a little lower, above his waist, where a scar runs across his side. ‘The price of peace in Afghanistan’, The series is titled. And the price he had to pay Khalil Ahmed, 15 years old, has been his kidney. Literally: her parents could no longer afford to buy food for their eleven children and decided to sell their eldest son’s left kidney for $3,500.

The Danish Mads Nissen photographed Khalil showing the scar and the image became one of the winners of the World Press Photo de 2023, contest that is installed at the Center de Cultura Contemporànea de Barcelona (CCCB) until next December 17 to show the best worst photos in the world. Or, in other words, the snapshots that portray a society shaken by war conflicts, migrations, the environmental crisis and social inequalities. “The best side of the human being is also present,” says Carlos G. Vela, spokesperson for the Photographic Social Vision Foundation.

And yes, you can see on the walls photographs of the celebration in Buenos Aires of Argentina’s victory in the World Cup in Qatar or a series about Peruvian alpaqueros with which Alexander Cinque recovers (and restores) faith in humanity, but here what rules is conflict. The tragedy. The permanent impact. “Reality and the big themes remain and we must continue telling the stories,” adds Vela. On paper and in the negative, this means reviewing a year marked by the war in Ukraine, the floods in Australia, the disappearance of the oases in Morocco, the mass demonstrations in Iran, the effects of the ‘war on drugs’ in the Philippines, the drama of migrants in the Mediterranean, the Venezuelan crisis…

“Let’s see what happens next year,” slides the photojournalist Emilio Morenatti, distinguished for his report ‘War Wounds’, about the wounded and maimed in Ukraine. And what happens, or will happen, is advanced without wanting to Maya Levin with his photograph of the eventful funeral in Jerusalem of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, killed by Israeli gunfire in May 2022.

Waiting for a next edition undoubtedly marked by the war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, This year’s has been frozen in the death of Irira Kalinina, a pregnant woman who died in March 2002, when Russian troops bombed Mariupol.

Khalil Ahmad shows the scar he received after his parents sold his kidney Mads Nissen

Evgeniy Maloletka He shot his camera just as five men were carrying Irira on a stretcher through ruins and debris, but the effort was of little use: her son was stillborn and she died a few minutes after giving birth. The photograph, winning image from World Press Photo 2023, is just the tip of the iceberg of a series by Maloletka himself focused on the site of Mariúpoly and the corpses thrown into mass graves.

At his side, mapping the horror, Morenatti’s report on the wounds and scars of war. “We are not only here to tell a reality, but also to get involved in it,” says the photojournalist, who lost his left leg in 2009 when a bomb exploded in Afghanistan. «I allow myself the luxury of talk from lame to lame. As a war wounded and amputee, I am closer to these people,” he points out about the protagonists of a series who, mutilated and severed, function as a metaphor “for the geographical amputation of a country.”

Another Spaniard, the Madrid native Caesar Dezfuli, He is the winner of a global award in the 2023 edition for his project ‘Passengers’, a very long report that began in 2016, when he began photographing, one by one, the 118 passengers of a boat adrift in the Mediterranean. . “He was looking for an alternative narrative to the boats full of people, since a message of an anonymous mass phenomenon was arriving,” explains Dezfuli. Since then, the photojournalist has located 105 of those people and has gone to visit 75 to show their evolution and understand the complexity of a migratory route that, he assures, is much more than the passage through the Mediterranean. “There are other stages that are just as difficult or more difficult,” he says.

In Barcelona, ​​in addition to shocking images of oil spills in Lima, portraits of the new generation of American rappers and the effects of toxic pesticides in Mexico, you can also see the series that a few weeks ago sparked controversy in Hungary: a graphic report on the domestic and daily life of the Golden Boys, a community Filipino LGBTQI+ senior citizen who shares a house in Manila and whose exhibition led the Hungarian government to prohibit access to the exhibition to those under 18 years of age and force the resignation of the museum director. According to World Press Photo exhibition curator Martha Echevarría, this is the first case of censorship which the exhibition faces in Europe. “It usually has problems in some countries, in Europe it is the first time,” he highlights. “What has happened in Hungary confirms the importance of the exhibition,” defends the director of the CCCB, Judit Carrera.