Meaningful moments
The World Press Photo of the Year 2011 captures a quiet moment during the chaos of last year’s Arab Spring.
SPANISH photographer Samuel Aranda won the 2011 World Press Photo of the Year award earlier this month for an image of a veiled woman holding a wounded relative in her arms after a demonstration in Yemen.
Jurors said Aranda’s photo, taken for The New York Times, encapsulated many facets of the uprisings across the Middle East known as the Arab Spring, one of the major news events of last year.
The photo was taken Oct 15, 2011, in a mosque in Sanaa, Yemen, that was being used as field hospital after demonstrators protesting the rule of Yemen President Ali Abdullah Saleh clashed with government forces.
“The winning photo shows a poignant, compassionate moment, the human consequence of an enormous event, an event that is still going on,” said jury chairman Aidan Sullivan. “We might never know who this woman is, cradling an injured relative, but together they become a living image of the courage of ordinary people that helped create an important chapter in the history of the Middle East.”
The woman is almost completely concealed under black robes as she clasps her relative, a thin man whose torso is bare, grimacing in pain.
Sullivan said Aranda thought the man might have been the woman’s husband, but he was not sure. He said the image has religious “almost Biblical” overtones and noted its resemblance in composition to Michelangelo’s Pieta – but in a Muslim setting.
“It stands for Yemen, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria, for all that happened in the Arab Spring,” said juror Koyo Kouoh. “But it shows a private, intimate side of what went on, and it shows the role that women played, not only as caregivers but as active people in the movement.”
Aranda worked anonymously in Sanaa several weeks during the demonstrations and for a while was the only Western news photographer working there, The New York
Times said in a blog post. “In the Western media, we seldom see veiled women in this way, at such an intimate moment,” added another jury member Nina Berman. “It is as if all the events of the Arab Spring resulted in this single moment – in moments like this.”
The tsunami in Japan was another major theme of the competition. Japanese photographer Yasuyoshi Chiba took first prize in the “People in the News Stories” category for AFP for images that include an April 3 photo of a Japanese woman standing alone and holding her daughter’s graduation certificate aloft after she found it amid a swirl of debris in Higashimatsushima.
In all, 57 photographers from 24 countries won awards in a field of more than 5,000 professional photographers, who submitted more than 100,000 entries.
The jury also itself nominated a photo taken by an unidentified amateur for special mention: a still image taken from a video of a Libyan National Transition Council
fighter pulling Muammar Gaddafi onto a military vehicle in Sirte, Libya, on Oct 20.
“The photo captures a historic moment, an image of a dictator and his demise that we otherwise would not have seen, had it not been photographed by a member of the public,” Sullivan said.
Aranda’s photo also took first place in the “People in the News Singles” category. The former AFP photographer now represented by Corbis Images will get 10,000 (RM40,500) and a Canon camera at a ceremony in Amsterdam on April 21, organisers said.