World Press Photo '22: "Kamloops Residential School" wins
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The Hague: A saddening photograph of crosses with girls' dresses draped on won the 2022 World Press Photo of the Year award. The photo features the area at Kamloops in Canada, where the remains of nearly 215 children were found last year, Agence France-Presse reported.
Amber Bracken, based in Edmonton, won the prize on Thursday for the photograph, which was judged as the kind that sears into one's memory and inspires a kind of sensory reaction. One of the judges said that Bracken's photo, published by The New York Times, is a quiet moment of global reckoning for the history of colonization worldwide.
The photo features little girls' dresses hanging on crosses on the right and to the left a rainbow. Near the highway at Kamloops, there was a residential school nearly a century ago that forcefully tried to induct "culture" into Canada's indigenous population. Where the rainbow lands in the picture were where the first of a series of mass graves were found. Pope Francis has apologized to the indigenous communities for the abuse committed on them by the church-run residential schools.
Investigations are still going on in Canada's former residential schools. There were more than 4,000 children believed to be missing.
This year, winning photographs were themed on the world's Indigenous communities.
Meanwhile, Australian documentary lensman Matthew Abbott won the first prize for the Story of the Year. He had captured a series of images showing native Nawarddeken people of the remote Arnhem Land using fire as a land-management tool to resist climate change. Abbott told AFP that the practice of "cool burning" had been there for tens of thousands of years, but now it has become complicated since the rapid change in the climate.
Brazilian photographer Lalo de Almeida won the Long Term Project Award for his pictures featuring deforestation's impact on Amazon's indigenous communities. Isadora Romero won the Open Format Award for her video on her family history in Columbia.
The winners receive a 6,500 US dollars reward and will get their works exhibited in Amsterdam from April 15.
