Aside from the doom and gloom, the exhibition includes glorious images from fields such as science, sport and entertainment.
The Beijing Olympic Games were the subject of some wonderful sports photos, though one of the most amusing entries in the sports category is a series of pre- and post-fight portraits of boxers in New York.
Another highlight is large format prints of Steve Winter’s photos of a snow leopard taken in Hemis National Park in the Ladakh region of the Indian Himalayas. The complex quest to capture images of this shy and illusive creature involved months of stakeouts and hugely sophisticated equipment. The intricate planning for and execution of this project is a marked contrast to images captured on the fly, such as Sebastian D’Souza’s photo story of the Mumbai terrorist attack for the Mumbai Mirror, which received an honorable mention, or Lissette Lemus’ photo of a mother shot dead at her child’s primary school in El Salvador, which according to Van der Valk, came out of a routine commission for a story on education.
The World Press Photo contest grows larger each year; a total of 96,268 photos were submitted by 5,508 photographers from 124 countries for this edition. While not all the images make for comfortable viewing, there is plenty to think about in this outstanding slice of some of the best images from last year. A photo gallery and reports from the contest can be found at the World Press Photo Web site at www.worldpressphoto.org.
RSS