Photo of the victim of the terrorist attack in Mariupol became the winner of the World Press Photo

Ukrainian military photojournalist. Eugene Maloletka was awarded this Thursday by the foundation Photos of the world press Photo of the Year: A scene in which emergency services try to save the life of a mother who has just lost her baby in a bombing at a maternity hospital in Mariupol.

“Kill me now!” he pleaded. Irina Kalinina, female 32 years old. In the photo, Ukrainian emergency services are taking her on a stretcher from the maternity hospital in the city of Kyiv. Mariupol, damaged as a result of an air strike by Russian troops. In the background are destroyed trees and branches, a column of smoke and the skeleton of two buildings that lost their windows due to bombs that fell moments before.

Photo

face Irina Kalinina describes the fatigue, but above all the pain from the horror that this mother has just experienced. She still shows the pregnant woman’s stomach, her black pants are stained with blood, and she appears lying on a stretcher, supported by five men who run to another hospital, even closer to the front line, to try to save her life. Her baby was born dead, and in half an hour Kalinina also passed away.

Eugene Maloletkamilitary photographer, journalist and film director from the Ukrainian city of Berdyansk (Zaporozhye), captured this tragic scene on March 9, 2022 in Mariupolwhich came under Russian control last May after several months of siege.

Eugene Maloletka

youngster has been covering the war in Ukraine since 2014, after the annexation of Crimea, and has also worked on the Euromaidan protests, 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.

Afghanistan

This prestigious photojournalism competition has three other global categories. In addition to the “Photo of the Year”, which won youngsterthere is also Story of the Year, which in this edition awards Danish photojournalist Mads Nissen (Politiken/Panos) for his work. The price of peace in Afghanistan. Nissen was the Photo of the Year winner in 2015 and 2021.

On this occasion, he was awarded for exposing the day-to-day hardships faced by civilians in the Taliban in Afghanistan following the withdrawal of US and allied forces in August 2021, followed by a halt in foreign aid and a freezing of billions of dollars. dollars of government reserves placed 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 feed his family in Herat. Taken on January 19 last year, it reflects a surge in the illegal organ trade in Afghanistan as a result of lack of work and hunger.

A severe drought in 2022 exacerbated the economic crisis in Afghanistan, where half the population is malnourished and more than a million children are severely malnourished, according to the UN.

In a “Long Term Project”, World Press Photo was dedicated to Armenian photographer Anush Babajanyan for “Boiled Water”, in which she captured how four landlocked Central Asian countries are grappling with the climate crisis and lack of coordination in shared water supplies: Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan upstream of the Syr Darya and Amu Darya, and Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan downstream.

Egypt

The fourth category, Open Format, is awarded to Egyptian photojournalist Mohamed Mahdi’s project titled Here the doors don’t know meabout the way of life of a community on the brink of extinction.

The work chronicles the displacement and loss of identity of the inhabitants of the coastal fishing village of Al-Maqs, located along the Mahmoudiya Canal in Alexandria, which, after years of uncertainty, has succumbed to demolition plans to make way for port developments in neighboring Alexandria. .

Its inhabitants refused to leave because they had always lived and worked on the canal leading to the Mediterranean Sea, and for six years they wrote “last letters” about the houses they lost and about former lives.

In response to popular resistance, the Egyptian media isolated the residents and branded them as criminals until 2020, when the government began to evict parts of the city and relocate people to houses a few kilometers from the canals, demolishing houses and endangering the local collective and cultural memory planted in the area. (As reported by EFE)