World Press Photo Award Winners

March 1, 2012 7:08 PM

Every World Press Photo Award Winner From 1955-2011. Many photos not safe for work and/or not safe for life, due to images of violence.
posted by Sticherbeast (26 comments total)

.
posted by tamitang at 7:25 PM on March 1, 2012

The hardest are always the children. Those images are a rebuke to all our comforts and assumptions.
posted by jadepearl at 7:32 PM on March 1, 2012 [1 favorite]

Dear God.
posted by SLC Mom at 7:36 PM on March 1, 2012

Images of violence are quite fine. PG-13, in fact. It's images of naked people that demand an R rating.
posted by hippybear at 7:46 PM on March 1, 2012 [1 favorite]

So many of these are lacking context information (region, or even country). Here is the reference on Wikipedia.
posted by idiopath at 7:47 PM on March 1, 2012 [4 favorites]

Lots of death.
posted by Defenestrator at 7:57 PM on March 1, 2012

I didn't really need a context to get the impact of any of these photos, myself. Christ Almighty.
posted by Lipstick Thespian at 7:57 PM on March 1, 2012

As a father, this photo always makes me tear up a little. It should forever be associated with George W. Bush, or anyone who ever claims that the United States somehow has the moral authority to conduct "regime change" in other countries.
posted by KokuRyu at 8:03 PM on March 1, 2012 [3 favorites]

You know, joy and beauty are also part of the human experience.
posted by stargell at 8:16 PM on March 1, 2012 [3 favorites]

Wonder why no awards were given in 1961 and 1970.
posted by ThatCanadianGirl at 8:33 PM on March 1, 2012

I'm with you KokuRyu. That was pretty hard to scroll through those pictures without an increasing sense of dread of what the next year would bring. The picture you reference though fills me with equal measures of sadness and anger. We don't how lucky we are and some don't know how lucky they were to get away with it.
posted by hornet67 at 9:16 PM on March 1, 2012 [2 favorites]

Every one of them has a descriptive caption, they hardly seem lacking for context. And yes, many are fairly shocking, but I feel like most of us have seen most of them before (the self-immolating monk, scarred Hutu man, etc), and I feel like there's not as big an impact the second time.

Still, some I hadn't seen before and were pretty tough. The woman who lost all five of her children at once. Man.
posted by tylerkaraszewski at 9:24 PM on March 1, 2012

Most I had seen before, but a few were new. Almost all of them deserved the award, and deserved the attention. A lot of them made me wonder "where are they now?" -- both the people in the photographs, and how the photograph affected the photographer.
posted by Forktine at 10:44 PM on March 1, 2012 [1 favorite]

I did wonder why photos all had to portray, for the most part, something horrific or sensational.
posted by KokuRyu at 10:56 PM on March 1, 2012

Dear God.

Was nowhere to be found.

Again.
posted by obiwanwasabi at 12:33 AM on March 2, 2012 [4 favorites]

We see the World Press Photo exhibition each year here in Amsterdam, and there's always a wide range of categories: news, sport, human interest, etc. However, the photo of the year is always selected to represent one of the year's characteristic news events.

There's often humour in the human interest stories, and the wildlife and sports photos are always spectacular, but I generally leave the exhibition shaken and angry at the amount of senseless cruelty we inflict upon each other.
posted by daveje at 1:43 AM on March 2, 2012 [1 favorite]

Wow that is a phenomenal amount of human misery captured on film right there.
posted by Faintdreams at 4:03 AM on March 2, 2012

The 2010 one, the mutilation, somehow makes me the angriest of all. I think with all the other horrors, I can somehow see how the perpetrators could talk themselves into thinking they were doing the right thing, or the least worst thing. Not with this. It seems to require some impulse of cruelty that goes beyond any rationalisation.
posted by Zarkonnen at 4:20 AM on March 2, 2012 [1 favorite]

:(
posted by beerbajay at 4:21 AM on March 2, 2012

fantastic link. thanks
posted by paradise at 5:50 AM on March 2, 2012

So much pain.

Thanks for posting this.

I need to take a walk now and look at the sky. Because sometimes human beings are monsters, and sometimes there are no words for the amount of suffering in the world.
posted by kinnakeet at 6:00 AM on March 2, 2012 [1 favorite]

The best of all possible worlds.
posted by thelonius at 8:01 AM on March 2, 2012

Pain, fear, injustice, death, murder, genocide, hate, bigotry, war, famine, disease, protest, defeat, anger, sorrow, hopelessness, oppression... another day on earth.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 8:18 AM on March 2, 2012

Forktine: "Most I had seen before, but a few were new. Almost all of them deserved the award, and deserved the attention. A lot of them made me wonder "where are they now?" -- both the people in the photographs, and how the photograph affected the photographer."

Well, Tim Hetherington who took the 2007 photo of a US soldier at Restrepo bunker, was killed in Libya last year.
posted by Happy Dave at 1:56 PM on March 2, 2012

That was rough.
posted by Catbunny at 2:52 PM on March 2, 2012

Like daveje, I try to see the World Press Photo exhibit each year. I see so much horror and beauty coexisting in the photos. I look at these photos to remember the world most people live in.
posted by Rora at 8:20 PM on March 2, 2012