The international jury and World Press Photo apologized for combining into one visual pair the photos "Beyond the Trenches" by Florian Bachmeier, featuring a Ukrainian child experiencing the consequences of war, and "Underground Field Hospital" by Nanna Heitmann, depicting a wounded Russian soldier.
The organizers of the competition wrote about this in response to an appeal from "Media Detector". World Press Photo did not publish an apology on its official pages.
“We should not have presented these two photographs as a pair, as this implies that they should be viewed and understood only in dialogue with each other. This creates an overly simplistic and false equivalence and relegates to the background the story that each of them unfolds on its own. These stories, meanwhile, point to only two aspects of Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine,” wrote the head of the international jury Lucy Conticello.
The organizersʼ response also noted that "there is a clear difference between a child suffering from the consequences of war and the torment of a soldier of the occupying forces who causes this suffering".
Currently, on the World Press Photo website, the photo of a Ukrainian child and a Russian soldier is divided by the work "Mika" by Dutch photographer Prins de Vos.
The international jury also commented on the award given to Mikhail Tereshchenko, a photographer for the Russian propaganda news agency TASS. His award for “Protests in Georgia” will not be revoked, but the jury promises to update the rules and procedures for handling applications from photographers working for state institutions.
The response added that World Press Photo disagrees with the phrase "liberation of Mariupol", which Mikhail Tereshchenko uttered in an interview after winning the award.
What is it about?
The World Press Photo organization has announced the winners of this yearʼs photo contest. The winning photos were classified by region, including Europe. Here, in the "Individual Photos" category, photographer Florian Bachmeier was recognized for his work "Beyond the Trenches". The photo shows six-year-old Anhelina from a village near Kupyansk, who was forced to leave her home due to the war. Against this background, Anhelina is experiencing panic attacks.
Florian Bachmeier
And at the same time, Nanna Heitmann was recognized for her photo “Underground Field Hospital”. The photo shows a wounded soldier who was called up to fight for Russia in the temporarily occupied territory of the Donetsk region. He was wounded near Bakhmut.
Nanna Heitmann
Russian photographer Mikhail Tereshchenko of the TASS propaganda agency won with his work “Protests in Georgia”. He photographed the November 2024 protests, when Georgians protested against Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze’s policies that put EU accession talks on hold. In an interview with TASS, Tereshchenko said that he had previously sent World Press Photo photos of “liberated Mariupol”, which he had taken during the “active phase of the liberation of the city of a million people”.
- The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine called World Press Photoʼs decision to create a "tandem" of two photographs depicting a war-traumatized Ukrainian child and a wounded Russian occupier "deplorable". The Ukrainian Association of Professional Photographers condemned the moral blindness of World Press Photo.
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