Before we say anything about this year’s World Press Photo Contest winners, please: go the “Full Screen” button above, immediately to the right of the slide counter, and look at these pictures as they are meant to be seen.
Thank you.
Now. Pietro Masturzo‘s haunting and eerily prescient “From the Rooftops of Tehran, June,” which shows opponents of the Iranian regime shouting their protests at twilight, is the World Press Photo of the Year for 2009.
“What we were really touched about is that this image in some way represents how a big story begins and how protest begins,” said Ayperi Karabuda Ecer, the vice president of pictures at Reuters and chairwoman of the jury.
“There is no big event going on,” she said, “but you still sense that there is something very particular and quite desperate in these lonely little people of the picture fighting something that you feel is much bigger. And we thought, as a jury, that it was very symbolic of how you can actually add layers to news and how you can view events differently from what we are used to.”
Two of the most talked-about pictures of 2009 were honored — both by photographers for The Associated Press and both from Afghanistan: David Guttenfelder‘s picture of soldiers returning Taliban fire (“Man in the Pink Boxers“) won second prize for people-in-the-news singles and Julie Jacobson‘s picture of a fatally wounded Marine (“To Publish or Not?“) won third prize for spot news singles.
Photographers on assignment for The New York Times won three prizes: Adam Ferguson, first prize in spot news singles, for his picture of a bombing victim in Kabul, taken only two months ago; Malick Sidibé, first prize in arts and entertainment singles, for a fashion layout in the Sunday Magazine, “ Prints and the Revolution“; and Rina Castelnuovo, third prize in general news singles, for her picture of a Jewish settler throwing wine at a Palestinian woman.
Adam Ferguson
“I was sitting in the New York Times Kabul bureau editing photos,” Mr. Ferguson recalled, “and then there was boom — the window rattled and I jumped.”
I knew it was a bomb and I knew it was not far away. I grabbed my camera and ran out the front door and started looking for the smoke cloud. I started running and by the time I was halfway there, one of the New York Times drivers caught up to me. I was one the first photographers there, along with an A.P. photographer. We were both delirious and frantic and there was no time to think about secondary blasts. People screamed out and injured people were carried from the scene, bodies on stretchers, blood on the ground and flames raging out of the car that was bombed. The buildings on both sides of the road were destroyed. The bomb was a big one. It had devastated the entire corner.
The police cleared the area and kicked us out after about 10 minutes of working.
Adam Ferguson’s picture as it appeared in The Times.Speaking of the picture, Patrick Witty, the international picture editor of The Times, said: “It gripped me from the moment it landed on my screen. The look on the woman’s face is haunting. It’s one powerful picture of many made by Adam over the two months he worked for us out of our bureau in Kabul.”
For his part, Mr. Ferguson, a 31-year-old Australian whose next assignment will find him back in Afghanistan, embedded with the Marines in Helmand Province, said he was flattered by the prize.
“Recognition like this not only honors me, but honors and recognizes the issues I photograph,” he wrote on Saturday. “The award is a celebration of my commitment to telling stories, not the tragedy I witnessed.”
Mr. Ferguson is being mentored — long distance — by Christopher Morris of the VII photo agency in New York.
“Having been assigned to be his mentor, I have never met him personally, and only communicated through e-mails,” Mr. Morris wrote on Friday. “But I’ve been amazed at his resolve and pure quality of his work. Very rare to see someone come along like this. Adam Ferguson is someone that has a very bright future ahead.”
Stephen Mayes, the managing director of VII’s New York office, wrote: “When the members of VII invited Adam to join the mentor program, they recognized that his strong eye was backed by clear thinking and unstoppable tenacity — he has all the makings of a great photojournalist. His prominent assignments, publications and now the World Press Photo award prove the point.”
Rina Castelnuovo
Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times Of Ms. Castelnuovo’s picture, Mr. Witty said, “It is an evocative image not easily forgotten.” He noted, “The red arc ominously takes the shape of a sickle.” The picture was taken on Shuhada Street in Hebron. As Ms. Castelnuovo recalled it:
The streets were mostly empty. I stopped to photograph some settlers marking the Jewish holiday of Purim. They were passing around a bottle of wine, toasting the holiday, nothing out of the ordinary. I noticed a Palestinian woman walking along the shut-down stores. A group of settlers were walking in the middle of the street in the opposite direction when one of them took a step towards her. I instinctually raised the camera.
She didn’t scream or stop, she hurried up the street and vanished around the corner. I was left angered and saddened — as if the wine hit me.
Malick Sidibé
Mr. Sidibé, now in his mid-70s, is a well established figure in Mali and renowned worldwide. Andreas Kokkino, the fashion editor who conceived and styled the spread, has said about working with Mr. Sidibé: “Instead of the usual hundreds and hundreds of frames per shot that I had become accustomed to in this era of digital photography, Sidibé took only two or three frames for every shot. When the shoot was over, he had only shot 22 frames on his Rolleiflex!”
And one of them was judged to be among the best in the world.
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