Highly Acclaimed World Press Photo Exhibition Finally Returns to NZ After Years of Covid
Time flies! It seems like just yesterday the Auckland exhibition of the world’s greatest pieces of photojournalism and documentary photography was being gracing our shores. But it was 2019, and we were but innocent lambs with no knowledge of what a “red light system” was in relation to a pandemic. Honestly, judging by my commute in this morning, nobody has any knowledge of what it is in relation to actual traffic either.
But now the World Press Photo Exhibition is back and better(?) than ever. When it comes to photo journalism, you have to be ready to be confronted with the realties of the world, and the stories the journalists involved bring back with them.
Four global winners were picked from a pool of 24 regional winners. Of these 24, there were more than 60,000 entries from 3,752 entrants across 127 countries. These are the historians of the present.
The overall winner this year comes from Evgeniy Maloletka, whose image you’ll most likely already be familiar with. It’s of a pregnant woman named Iryna Kalinina being carried out on a stretcher among the rubble of the Mariupol Maternity hospital that had just been airstriked in the early days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Unfortunately, neither mother or baby survived. Maloletka stayed with civilians for the next twenty days of the invasion. “We came to Mariupol just one hour before the invasion,” he says. “For 20 days, we lived with paramedics in the basement of the hospital, and in shelters with ordinary citizens, trying to show the fear Ukrainians were living with.”
The Story of the Year winner is comprised of nine haunting photos by Mads Nissen, who refuses to let us forget the people of Afghanistan living now under the Taliban with a lack of international aid. Just because these stories stop making front page news doesn’t mean they stopped happening.
The exhibition will take place from 22nd July – 20th August at Smith and Caughey’s newly opened Level 5 Gallery Space. So it’s a perfect chance to check the new space out as well while you’re there!
World Press Photo Exhibition
Dates: Saturday 22nd July – Sunday 20th August
Times: 10.30am – 6.30 pm (except Sunday 20 August which is 6pm)
Location: Level 5, Smith and Caughey’s, 261 Queen Street
Ticket Prices: Adult weekend $25.00, Adult weekday $20.00, Student/Senior Citizen: $15 any time
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