by PATRICK LEJTENYI

2005 was a busy year: in February, former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was murdered. In April, the Pope died. In July, as the G8 met in Scotland, the Live 8 concerts tried to raise awareness about HIV/AIDS and poverty in Africa, only to be overshadowed by four suicide bomb attacks against London’s public transportation network, and the FINA aquatic championships opened in Montreal.

In August, Israel began its settler withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, and Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. In October, Hurricane Wilma pounded the Yucatan, riots rocked the suburbs of Paris and an earthquake devastated Kashmir. In November, bombs killed 50 in a series of explosions in Amman, Jordan. Anti-immigrant riots broke out in Sydney, Australia, in December. And throughout the year, violence continued in Iraq, Darfur and elsewhere, while disease, famine and drought killed millions more.

The world’s press photographers were there to cover these events and, for the 49th time, the best photos were celebrated by the World Press Photo competition. This year, the top prize was awarded to Senegal-based Reuters photographer Finbarr O’Reilly, a 35-year-old Canadian from Vancouver. His photo, of a mother holding her tiny, malnourished baby during Niger’s food crisis last summer, is a simple though powerful portrait of dignity and strength in the face of disaster. It, and dozens of others, are on display this month at the World Press Photo exhibit, being held (somewhat incongruously) at the Just for Laughs Museum (2111 St-Laurent).

Focusing in

O’Reilly made a somewhat roundabout journey to becoming an award-winning photographer. A former arts reporter for the Globe and Mail and National Post, he only took up photojournalism two years ago, when reporting from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Forced to take his own photos, he started with a simple digital point and shoot, until, he says, his editors in London liked what he was doing so much they gave him a fancy camera and satellite phone to send the pics back to head office.

The Nigerien photo, he says, was taken under somewhat unusual circumstances. “I’d eaten some bad spaghetti the day before and was feeling violently ill,” he says, his accent showing some traces of his childhood in Wales and Ireland. “So I was spending the morning in a tent [run by Doctors Without Borders] with malnourished children, and just got absorbed and focused on what was going on—which is what reporters should be doing anyway, but usually we’re too pressed for time.”

After spending a couple of hours shooting, he approached the mother, Fatou Ousseini, holding her son Alassa Galisou, and, through body language, got her permission to shoot. Just as he was preparing the shot, the child’s hand had dropped from the mother’s nose to her mouth.

“There were a lot of elements I got in there,” he says. First and foremost, from the child’s tiny arm, the problem of malnutrition, but also the mother’s strength and dignity. The positioning of the hand over the mouth, he says, also conveyed a feeling that Nigeriens in general had no voice of their own.

Something special

Like all photojournalists, O’Reilly shoots a lot. Some work, others don’t, but the sheer volume of pictures he takes pretty much guarantees he’ll shoot something worthwhile. But he confesses he had no idea the photo he’d taken in the Nigerien tent would win him World Press Photo of the Year, even if he knew then that he got something special. But when a friend called him earlier this year to give him the news, “They didn’t have to tell me which one it was. I knew,” he says.

“To be honest, it was a bit awkward, because I hadn’t been doing it that long,” he says. But his colleagues were by and large supportive and happy for him—at least they were to his face, he says—which was encouraging, given the job’s intensely competitive field. He credits the more experienced photographers he met in Africa with giving him pointers and tips and answering his questions. Their helpfulness and generosity, he says, comes with the territory.

“Photographers have a real fraternity, even if it is always competitive,” he says.

World Press Photo runs until Sept. 24 at the Just for Laughs Museum (2111 St-Laurent).