CULTURE
10 CORSO COMO PRESENTS WORLD PRESS PHOTO CONTEST
JULY 30, 2019
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WORDS
by KRISTOPHER FRASER
PHOTOS
COURTESY of PURPLE PR
“May you live in interesting times.” An English expression purported to be a translation of a Chinese curse, but a phrase that many journalists throughout the decades can relate to. This year, 10 Corso Como, a luxury multi-brand retailer and art gallery space, is playing host to the World Press Photo Contest exhibit, a compilation of the interesting (and politically turbulent) times we live in.
The World Press Photo Exhibition is a yearly exhibition that’s the result of a contest and is considered the most famous photojournalism contest in the world, described as the Pulitzer Prize for photojournalism. This year the committee received 80,000 pictures from 5000 photographers. An independent jury is selected, this year’s being chaired by Whitney Johnson, editor-in-chief of National Geographic. World Press tries to make the jury as diverse as possible to get diverse points of view. In total, the jury is comprised of 19 people. In the first round they have a general jury, and then in the later rounds they have a specialized jury for categories including sports, nature, environment, and portraits just to name a few. In two weeks, the jury goes through 80,000 pictures, and they are stuck in a dark room just looking at photographs. Although they are all professionals in their field, it can be quite intense.
In the first round they only have about two seconds per photo to look through every single one, and then they move photos to the second round, and the third round, and so on. When they look for winning photos, judges are looking for two things: really thrilling, exciting, visually beautiful images, and an image with a story behind it. Each winning photo can’t be just a pretty picture or a good story, it has to be both.
The criteria for submission are applicants must be professional photojournalists and the image must be from the previous year, although nowadays what qualifies as that has more grey area. Not everyone has a press pass nowadays with so many photographers working freelance, so experience is taken into consideration. The contest is also anonymous, so the jury doesn’t know which photographer they are looking at until the final selection when they make the ultimate choice.
Over 120 photographers from 126 different countries submit to the contest. This year’s phot exhibition features 45 winners from 23 different countries, including 10 from the United States. While each category has a certain number of winners, the crown prize of the entire contest is the World Press Photo of the Year.
This year’s winner of the World Press Photo Contest was Getty photographer John Moore for his photo of Crying Girl on the Border. Moore has been photographing the U.S. Border Patrol as they worked along the U.S./Mexico border and chasing images of people who were coming across here illegally and asylum seekers in the United States. The majority of people coming here that he was shooting were from Central America.
10 Corso Como World Press Photo Exhibit
10 Corso Como World Press Photo Exhibit
The night he captured his winning image a group of women and children had come across on rafts that evening, and he spoke to a mother who was with a little girl who was crying. Moore got to speak to them briefly, then took some pictures, and then the women and children were taken to a processing center by a Border Patrol agent.
“It was the first time I had photographed during the Zero Tolerance Policy of the Trump Administration,” Moore said. “It was still relatively new at that point, and so I knew that there’s a possibility that some families may be separated after they were taken into custody, and I didn’t know who would. I was very happy to find out later that Yanela, the two-year-old, and her mother Sandra, remained together, but for thousands of others that wasn’t the case.”
As a news photographer, Moore has long gravitated toward topics that are in the news on a daily basis. This particular picture he took was part of a longer-term project. He’s been photographing immigration issues for the last decade on the U.S./Mexico border, in addition to Latin America and other parts of the United States. Early in his career he lived in Mexico and Central America, and he was fluent in Spanish. Naturally, his career brought him to the United States to continue with his work of covering immigration.
Moore was inspired to start covering immigration because, “I had lived in Central America, in Mexico, and I understood the reasons why people leave,” he said. “Yes of course, it’s poverty, and increasingly in the last decade, violence. But also, climate change and long-term drought are causing people to leave their farms, leave the countryside, and try to find a new life elsewhere. We’ve seen that many people have been seeking political asylum in the U.S., and that trend has grown this year.”
