The international jury and World Press Photo apologized to the Ukrainian people for combining two incompatible works into one visual pair: "Underground Field Hospital" by Nanna Heitmann and "Beyond the Trenches" by Florian Bachmeier.
Points of attention
- The acknowledgment of the mistake by the award representatives emphasized the importance of understanding the distinct narratives of each photograph independently.
- Despite the apology, the controversy continued as the award given to Mikhail Tereshchenko, a photographer from the Russian news agency TASS, was not revoked.
World Press Photo publicly admitted its guilt
What is important to understand is that German photographer Florian Bachmeier showed a six-year-old Ukrainian girl from the Kharkiv region, Angelina, in his photo. She began to suffer from panic attacks due to constant shelling by the Russian army.
This photo was called Beyond the Trenches and, according to the author, "became the emotional center of the European bloc."
To this, a photo by German photographer Nanna Heitmann was unexpectedly added to the visual pair.
Her photo is called Underground Field Hospital — it depicts a wounded "DPR" militant who fought on the side of the Russian army.
After a huge scandal erupted over the combination of these incompatible photos, the award representatives finally officially admitted their mistake.
They stated that there is a clear difference between a child suffering from the effects of war and the torment of a soldier of the occupying forces who causes that suffering.
"We should not have presented these two photographs as a pair, as this implies that they should only be seen and understood in dialogue with each other. This creates an oversimplified and false equivalence and relegates to the background the story that each of them unfolds on its own," said Lucy Conticello, head of the international jury.
Despite this, it is stated that the jury refused to cancel the award received by Mikhail Tereshchenko, a photographer for the Russian news agency TASS.
