Evgeniy Maloletka, a war photojournalist, has been the winner in the latest edition of the World Press Photo awards in the Best Photo of the Year category. Maloletka, who has been photographing the war in Ukraine, has won the award by immortalizing the scene in which the emergency services tried to save the life of Iryna Kalinina, a 32-year-old woman who had just lost her baby. she was pregnant in the bombing of a maternity hospital in Mariupo.
Kalinina, 32, is pictured lying on a stretcher, covered in blood. In the background, destroyed trees and branches, a column of smoke and destroyed buildings. In her face you can see reflected the pain and horror that she had just experienced. She still appears with a pregnant belly, but she died shortly after.
Evgeniy Maloletka, a war photographer, journalist and filmmaker from the Ukrainian city of Berdyansk (Zaporizhia), captured this tragic scene on March 9, 2022 in Mariupol, which fell under Russian control last May after months of siege.
He covers the war in Ukraine since 2014, after the annexation of Crimea, and has also done work on the protests of the Euromaidan movement, the protests in Belarus, the Nagorno-Karabakh war and the evolution of the covid-19 pandemic in Ukraine, collaborating with prestigious media such as the Associated Press, Al Jazeera, Der Spiegel and others.
This prestigious photojournalism contest has three other global categories. In addition to the Photo of the Year, which Maloletka won, there is also the “Story of the Year”, which in this edition rewards the Danish photojournalist Mads Nissen (Politiken/Panos) for his work “The price of peace in Afghanistan”. Nissen was a winner for “Photo of the Year” in 2015 and 2021.
On this occasion, he has been awarded for his denunciation of the daily difficulties faced by civilians in Taliban Afghanistan, after the withdrawal of US and allied forces in August 2021, which was followed by the end of foreign aid. and the freezing of billions of dollars of government reserves deposited abroad.
One of his work photos shows Jalil Ahmad, a 15-year-old boy whose kidney was sold by his parents for $3,500 to pay for food for the family, in Herat. He took it on January 19 of last year and reflects the dramatic increase in the illegal trade in organs in Afghanistan, as a result of lack of work and hunger.
The intense droughts of 2022 exacerbated the economic crisis in Afghanistan, where half the population does not have enough food and more than a million children are severely malnourished, according to the UN.
In “Long-term project”, the World Press Photo has been for the Armenian photographer Anush Babajanyan for “Boiled water”, a work with which she has reflected how four landlocked Central Asian countries fight against the climate crisis and the lack of coordination over shared water supplies: Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan upstream on the Syr Darya and Amu Darya rivers, and Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan downstream.
The fourth category is “Open Format”, which rewards a project by the Egyptian photojournalist Mohamed Mahdy entitled “Here the doors don’t know me”, about a way of community life on the verge of disappearing.
The work recounts the displacement and loss of identity of the residents of the coastal fishing village of Al Max, located along the Mahmudiyah canal in Alexandria, which, after years of uncertainty, succumbed to demolition plans to make way for developments. ports in neighboring Alexandria.
Its inhabitants refused to leave because they have always lived and worked on the channel that leads to the Mediterranean, and, for six years, they wrote “last letters” about the houses they were losing and the lives they used to have.
In response to community resistance, the Egyptian media isolated the residents and smeared them as criminals, until 2020, when the government began to evict parts of the town and relocate people to homes several kilometers away from the canals, demolishing houses and endangering local collective and cultural memory embedded in the neighborhood.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project