Today, Thursday 7 April, the winners of the World Press Photo Contest 2022 were announced, the photojournalism and documentary photography contest in which over four thousand photographers from 130 countries took part.
A jury awarded the best shots taken on the occasion of journalistic reports, already published in the most important world newspapers such as the New York Times and National Geographic. The winners, divided into different categories, prevailed among 64823 other shots, in color and black and white, taken in every latitude, capturing ancient practices, rituals or the effects of the great environmental disasters that have occurred in recent years.
The winning photo of the absolute award as World Press Photo of the Year is that of Canadian Amber Bracken, in which red dresses are seen hanging in Kamloops, to commemorate the 215 unmarked graves found at the Kamloops Indian Residential School.
The journalistic story of the year is instead the one photographed by Matthew Abbott for National Geographic, which tells the way in which the indigenous Australians spontaneously burn the undergrowth to prevent fires on a larger scale. This practice has been in place in Australia for thousands of years and has been perfectly documented by Abbott.
There are also reports carried out for years, such as that of Lalo de Almeida, a Brazilian who in Amazonian Dystopia told the deforestation of the green lung of Brazil also due to the environmental policies of President Jair Bolsonaro. The bewildered faces of the natives gave shots of strong journalistic and anthropological importance.
In addition to the prize pool, the winners will have the opportunity to appear in the World Press Photo Yearbook 2022, a yearbook that collects the most beautiful images and the comments of the jury for each photo, published in six languages and available from the beginning of May. Also in the same period, the world tour of the exhibition will start, which in 2021 touched 66 cities in 29 states.