2023-11-09 17:45:42
The Spanish photojournalist Emilio Morenatti spent six months in Ukraine on different trips. “I saw the metaphor of the geographical amputation of the country by the invader and the amputations that people suffer due to weapons. It was my way of examining that individual drama. As a war wounded and also an amputee, I have an advantage: tI become closer to these people and support them psychologically by sharing my experience. I lost my leg years ago. In Ukraine I found a woman who buried her leg next to her 14-year-old sonkilled in the attack, in the garden of his house.” His images of the war in Ukraine, which have earned him a honorable mention in the World press photo 2023 (Europe), if codean with the Ukrainian Evgeniy Maloletkaauthor of Photography of the Year, ‘Air Raid on Mariupol Maternity Hospital’ depicts Iryna Kalinina, an injured pregnant woman who died shortly after giving birth to her stillborn baby, whom she had named Miron, which means peace. Ukraine one of the most visible issues, along with the Afghanistan controlled by the Talibanthe historical protests for women in Iranthe devastating and global effects of the climate crisis…but also the migrations and stories of social inequality, resilience and gender issues, which star in the World Press Photo 2023 winning works and which until December 17 shows the exhibition of Contemporary Culture Center of Barcelona (CCCB).
Together with Morenatti, he presents the prestigious exhibition of photojournalism and documentary photography Caesar Dezfuli (Madrid, 1991), the only Spaniard to have achieved a global award in the Open Format category. It has been thanks to ‘Passengers’, a project started in 2016 and still ongoing about the complex reality of migration in the Mediterraneanwhere he follows the lives of 75 people after photographing them recently rescued at sea.
The exhibition, which will travel to 90 cities, comes to the Catalan capital for the nineteenth consecutive year thanks to the Photographic Social Vision Foundation. They expose themselves 119 images of 24 regional winners from 23 countries and 4 global winners (all chosen from 3,752 photographers from 127 countries and 60,448 photographs submitted to the competition).
Get involved with victims
A Morenatti, Associated Press photographer, likes to get involved in the stories he tells. “One aims to be useful, I try to tell a common experience and contribute something to people who suffer an amputation and who are part of the history of Ukraine. Like an 11-year-old girl who lost both legs and whom I followed in her process until United States, where they have given her new legs made there. Her mother asked me how I saw them, how she was doing. She returned home and is now running races,” says the journalist, who regrets that the Gaza conflict is making forget the war in Ukraine.
Organ trafficking and hunger in Afghanistan
From the Danish Mads Nissen it is the Graphic Report of the Year, ‘The price of peace in Afghanistan’. Women in burqas begging for bread in Kabul and young Khalil Ahmad, 15, showing a large scar to the camera: his parents sold one of his kidneys for $3,500 on the black market for organs.
Among the main awards, also ‘Battered Waters’, by Anush Babajanyan, Long Term Project, about the lack of water in Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, aggravated by the climate crisis, and the World Press Photo for the Open Format ‘Here ‘The Doors Don’t Recognize Me’ by Mohamed Mahdy, which explores the effects of rising sea levels on Al Max, a fishing village in Alexandria, Egypt.
The 2022 exhibition, which received 62,000 visitorsco-produced by the CCCB and with the collaboration of the Banco Sabadell Foundation, was canceled in Budapest (Hungary) for dealing with LGTBI issues in what Marta Echevarría, of the World Press Photo Foundation, denounces as the first case of censorship they have suffered in Europe.
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