2023-04-21 18:19:42
An injured young pregnant woman lies on a stretcher carried by four men, three belong to the emergency service, the fourth, a volunteer, lifts the arm of the injured victim in the leg and foot. His hand is placed on his rounded lower abdomen.
A fifth man accompanies the makeshift procession which crosses a landscape of desolation, the ground is covered with torn branches, in the background the hospital of Mariupol devastated by Russian strikes still smoking. Alas, the mother and the child will not survive this attack: Iryna Kalinina aged 32 will die shortly after giving birth to her stillborn child whom she had named Miron, derived from myrpeace in Ukrainian.
A field photographer
This photograph was taken on March 9, 2022 by Evgeniy Maloletka, Ukrainian correspondent photographer for the AP agency. In his thirties, the freelance photojournalist has been covering the Ukrainian conflict since 2014, he has also documented the Maidan revolution, the protests in Belarus, the Nagorno-Karabakh war and the Covid pandemic in Ukraine.
Evgeny Maloletka, one of the few photographers to document events in Mariupol at the time of the Russian offensive, testified: “We arrived in Mariupol just an hour before the invasion. For twenty days we lived with paramedics in the basement of the hospital and in shelters with ordinary citizens, trying to show the fear with which Ukrainians lived. »
The jury found that “This image captured the absurdity and horror of war. By giving it global exposure, it hopes the world will stop and recognize the intolerable realities of this war and think about Ukraine’s future.” This poignant shot had previously received first prize in the photo category of the Bayeux Prize for War Correspondents in October 2022.
The entire report by Evgeniy Maloletka covering the three weeks of the Battle of Mariupol also obtained in September 2022, the Visa d’or News, from the Perpignan International Photojournalism Festival.
A prestigious award
The World Press Photo competition has distinguished the best photojournalism and documentary photography of the year since 1955. This year’s winners were chosen from among 4,066 photographers from 130 different countries.
The other three winners are Danish Mads Nissens for his series The Afghanistan Peace Prize, which recounts the humanitarian emergency that affects the population on a daily basis, since the return of the Taliban to power in August 2021; Armenian Anush Babajanyan for her long-term project, Beaten waters also winner of the 1is Terre solidaire prize, which documents the water crisis in Central Asia; and the Egyptian Mohamed Mahdy who received the free format prize for a work on the disappearance of the traditional way of life of fishermen in the district of El-Max in Alexandria, mixing his own photographs, archives and writings.
The work of the winners will be exhibited from April 22 in Amsterdam, where the World Press Foundation is based, before being shown around the world, and in particular in France in September as part of the Visa pour l’image festival in Perpignan. .
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