photo of children’s mass graves in canada

Amsterdam.Red clothing hangs by the roadside in memory of the dead of indigenous children in Canada: The discovery of a mass grave of 215 children in the city of Kamloops in the summer of 2021 won the global “World Press Photo” contest. It comes from Canadian Amber Bracken, as the jury announced Thursday in Amsterdam. There were 65,000 images from over 4,000 photographers from 130 countries to choose from. Constantino Tsakalidis took the best single from Europe for Bloomberg News. It shows the huge wildfires in the Greek island of Evia in the summer of 2021.

The winning photo of Canada, published in The New York Times, shows a cross under a dark sky with storm clouds and a rainbow. “It’s a picture that will burn in your memory,” said jury chair Rena Efendi. “I could almost hear the silence in this picture, a silent moment of global reckoning with the history of colonization, not only in Canada but around the world.” Canada was deeply shaken by the discovery of the mass grave. For decades, Aboriginal children were forcibly placed in boarding schools for re-education.

Photos from Australia and Brazil honored

The jury awarded the photographs in different categories. Australian Matthew Abbott won with Best Photo Story: A series about an ancient Aboriginal tradition of burning land in a controlled manner to prevent uncontrolled bushfires. In the Long-Term Projects category, Brazil’s Lalo de Almeida won a series about endangered rainforests in the Amazon. Ecuadorian photographer Isadora Romero was awarded for photographs about the consequences of forced migration.

This year for the first time the winners were selected according to the new rules: First, prizes were awarded for six regions. From this selection, global winners were chosen.

rnd/dpa