Reviewed by John Daly-Peoples
World Press Photo Auckland
Level 5, Smith & McCaughey’s
22 July – 20 August 2023.
Reviewed by John Daly-Peoples
After a three-year absence due to COVID-19 the World Press Photo Exhibition has returned to Auckland. The exhibition showcases the winning images of the World Press Photo competition, selected from over 60,000 entries from around the world.
The World Press Photo Contest has recognised professional press and documentary photographers since it began in 1955. The 2023 contest has six worldwide regions – Africa, Asia, Europe, North & Central America, South America, and Southeast Asia & Oceania and four categories (Single, Story, Long Term Project and Open Format). The winning entries from the six Regions in each category form this remarkable exhibition with four global winners chosen.
Many of the photographs in the exhibition deal with conflicts around the world including the war in the Ukraine. Evgeniy Malotetka has documented the battle for Mariupol with images of a pregnant woman being carried from the Maternity Hospital, people sheltering in a basement and bodies being put into a mass grave.
The civil war in Myanmar has been documented by Mauk Khan Wah showing a group of soldiers in his photo “Retrieving the Dead”. Maya Levin has followed the conflict in Israel and one of her photographs is of the funeral of the journalist Shireen Abu Akleh where Israeli troops confront a crowd of Palestinian mourners.
As well as the brutal side of conflicts the photographers have captured more positive aspects of life. A series of photographs by Simone Tramonte titled “Net-Zero Transition” documents developing technologies offering new routes to a net-zero economy. His photographs include images of a solar plant in Spain which uses solar heat to provide electricity a fourteen floor vertical farm and a photobioreactor.
On the flip side of this drive for sustaining agriculture is the series of photographs titles “Beautiful Poison’, which is an exploration by Christopher Roger Blanquet of the legal but lethal pesticides used in the flower and agriculture sectors of Mexico.
There is also a surreal image by Jonas Kakop of three white clad beekeepers in the Arizona desert who are providing water to bee hives as the Colorado River dries up.
While there has been mention made over the last decade about Egypt building a new capital there have been few images of this development. A set of images by Nick Hannes show the scale of the construction of the new administrative capital east of Cairo. Here we see the huge scale of the development with multi storied buildings, one of the largest mosques In the world and the huge new Arc de Triomphe. Also included is a large billboard celebrating the new area with an image of President el-Sisi .
In contrast to these images of the new Egypt is a series of photos by Mohamed Mandy who has documented the canal slums of Alexandria and the eviction of the local residents.
Mads Nissen has documented the fate of Afghanistan showing the impact of the Taliban takeover with the image of a 15 year old boy who has sold a kidney to earn money along with an image of burka clad women begging for bread outside a bakery.
This exhibition was brought to New Zealand by The Rotary Club of Auckland as a fundraiser for charity.
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