Beauty, blood,
triumph, tragedy

The winners of the World Press Photo
competition pack in all this and more

GENERAL NEWS: First prize (singles)

by LORRAINE CARPENTER

The Obama presidential campaign, the U.S. housing crisis, the Sichuan earthquake, California’s recall of same-sex rights, Zimbabwe’s hyperinflation, Chile’s volcanic action, Usain Bolt’s Olympic victory, India Fashion Week in Delhi, a Dennis Hopper film retrospective in France. All of these events, phenomena, catastrophes and triumphs occurred in 2008, and all are reflected in the winning entries of this year’s World Press Photo (WPP) competition.

The exhibition arrives in Montreal this month, and is packaged with five other photography exhibitions, among them La Foire de l’image, a collection of over 400 photos by 100 Canadian photographers, and Anthropographia, a photojournalism competition dealing exclusively with human rights issues—for details about all six exhibits, see hahaha.com/worldpressphoto.

Whereas Anthropographia focuses on injustice and tragedy, the range of WPP’s subjects is broad enough to appeal to every taste, though the severely squeamish and easily saddened should probably avert their eyes from roughly half of the exhibition.

PEOPLE IN THE NEWS: First prize (singles)

The General News winner by Brazil’s Luiz Vasconcelos depicts a woman holding a baby in one arm and pushing against a wall of riot police with the other. She was one of many squatters in the Brazilian town of Manaus who were evicted last March during a protest against a lack of housing in the area.

The winner in the People in the News category, by Japan’s Yasuyoshi Chiba, captures a traditional battle between Maasai warriors and members of the Kalenjin tribe in Kenya. Despite the lack of close combat and old-school choice of weaponry (bows and arrows), 20 people were killed over two months.

The winning Nature photo by the USA’s Steve Winter was the result of remotely operated camera traps placed in the Indian Himalayas. The elusive, endangered and camouflaged snow leopard was shot against a starry backdrop that is simply awesome, in the true sense of the word.

Whether the photos tell a story on their own, add depth where words fail, provide a glimpse into obscure corners of our world or capture the hidden magic of everyday life, they all have power in their aesthetic and their vision.

Exhibition director Raymond Cantin feels that photojournalism is the frontline of news dissemination because photographers often beat their print and broadcast colleagues to the punch.

“Most of the time, they’re there before the media’s there, before the TV and the newspapers, because they’re chasing after great news that they’d be the first to report,” he says. “We need these ambassadors to let us see what’s really going on in the world.”

NATURE: First prize (stories)

AT THE JUST FOR LAUGHS MUSEUM
(2111 ST-LAURENT) UNTIL OCT. 4.