Armenian girl's image wins World Press Photo portrait award

PanARMENIAN.Net - The captivating portrait of an Armenian girl with Resignation Syndrome by Polish photographer Tomek Kaczor has won the World Press Photo award in the Portrait category.

Resignation Syndrome is a disorder in which children overwhelmed by trauma slip into a coma-like state.

Ewa, the girl in the picture, succumbed to RS while her family were trying for asylum in Sweden and threatened with deportation to Poland, which had been their country of first arrival as refugees. They feared being sent back to Armenia. The family was deported to Poland, despite Ewa’s illness, but she recovered eight months after they arrived.

Kaczor revealed the story behind the picture, how he learned about the 15-year-old girl and went on to receive such recognition for his work in a conversation with PanARMENIAN.Net

A photo from last year's popular uprising in Sudan, titled "Straight Voice" and taken by AFP photographer Yasuyoshi Chiba, has won the prestigious World Press Photo of the Year Award. The photo has also won in the General News category.

Judges said Chiba's "poetic" photo showed the power of youth and art.

Longtime ruler Omar al-Bashir was overthrown last April, leading to a violent struggle between the military and the pro-democracy movement.

Discussing the image, Chiba said: "This moment was the only peaceful group protest I encountered during my stay. I felt their undefeated solidarity like burning embers that remain to flare up again."

Winners in each individual category were also announced.

First prize in Environment category; photographer – Esther Horvath

A polar bear and her cub come close to equipment placed by scientists from Polarstern, a ship that is part of a scientific expedition investigating the consequences of Arctic climate change, in the central Arctic Ocean.

The Arctic harbors some of the fastest-retreating sea ice on the planet and has twice the average global heating rate. This will strongly affect the global climate in terms of increasing temperatures and sea-level rise, yet Arctic climate system processes are poorly represented in climate models. This is because until now scientific missions have not been able to penetrate the region during the six-month long night of the Arctic winter. The Polarstern is the central ship of an expedition run by the Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate (MOSAiC), especially designed to withstand extremely low temperatures and break through thicker ice, enabling around 100 researchers and crew to work all year round. MOSAiC data on the atmosphere, ocean, sea ice, ecosystem and biogeochemistry will be fed into global climate models.

First prize in Contemporary Issues; photographer – Nikita Teryoshin

A businessman locks away a pair of anti-tank grenade launchers at the end of an exhibition day, at the International Defence Exhibition and Conference (IDEX) in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

IDEX is the biggest defense exhibition and conference in the Middle East, and one of the biggest arms trade-fairs in the world. No official attendance figures are released, but according to UAE state media, the event was expected to draw 1,200 global defense specialists, 1,235 exhibitors and more than 105,000 visitors. War is staged in an artificial environment where mannequins and screen images take the place of real people, and with outdoor demonstrations and daily choreographed battle displays on water.

First prize in Nature category; photographer – Alain Schroeder

The body of a month-old orangutan lies on a rescue team’s surgical drape, near the town of Subulussalam, Sumatra, Indonesia. She died soon after being found with her injured mother on a palm oil plantation.

Orangutans live on just two islands in the world, Sumatra and Borneo, and are being forced out of their natural rainforest habitat as palm oil plantations, logging and mining proliferate. According to the World Wildlife Fund, there are only around 14,000 Sumatran orangutans left. As female orangutans dedicate eight to nine years raising each child before having another, populations are easily at risk of decline. The baby orangutan’s mother, named Hope by rescue workers, was found totally blind, with a broken clavicle and 74 air-gun wounds. She had been shot at by villagers after eating fruit from their orchards.

First prize in Spot News category; photographer – Farouk Batiche

Algeria had been embroiled in protests since February. Initially, protests had been aimed at ousting long-time president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, an 81-year-old veteran of Algeria’s independence struggle who had been in ill-health and not seen in public for some time. Bouteflika resigned in April, handing over to a military-backed caretaker government, but demonstrations continued. Protesters demanded the cancellation of the presidential elections set to take place on 4 July and a return to civilian democracy. They also called for the departure of government officials associated with the Bouteflika administration, including the interim president and prime minister. Protests continued into 2020 without successful resolution.

First prize in Sport category; photographer – Mark Blinch

In the photo, Kawhi Leonard (squatting, center) of the Toronto Raptors watches his game-winning buzzer-beater shot go into the net, while playing against the Philadelphia 76ers in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference Semifinals of the 2019 National Basketball Association (NBA) Playoffs, at the Scotiabank Arena, Toronto, Canada.

A buzzer-beater is a successful shot made just as the buzzer sounds to indicate the end of a game, or period in a game.