IMAGINE you are a 35 year old Italian photographer in Libya to photograph Col. Muammar Gadafy. You are woken in the middle of the night and taken to the office of the director of government information. This is it, you think. I've gone too far. My hour has come.
Instead you are shaken warmly by the hand and told: "Col Gadafy sends you his congratulations and would like you to know that meeting him has brought you good fortune. You have won the top award in an international photography contest."
Phew. This is what happened to Francesco Zizola, winner of World Press Photo of the Year 1997. His winning photo shows three Angolan children in Kuito - two girls and a boy - in a centre for children traumatised by war. The girl in the centre clutches her makeshift white doll. The boy is on crutches, having lost a leg in a landmine.
Zizola, whose work was chosen out of 35,650 photographs sent in from 119 countries, explains his reasons for taking the winning photo: "I am often asked why I photograph worlds which are remote in every way from our daily lives. Well, I don't see it that way. The story of the antipersonnel mines scattered all over Angola confronts us Italians with the fact that we produce and sell these cowardly devices. Italy is one of the biggest producers of antipersonnel mines in the world." Some 70,000 Angolans, 8,000 of them children, have been disabled by exploding landmines, the legacy of decades of colonisation.
The World Press Photo Foundation is an independent, nonprofit platform for international press photography, founded in the Netherlands in 1955. Prizes were awarded in nine competition categories in April, to photographers from Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and the US (sadly, not from Ireland). A touring exhibition of the winning photographs has been travelling around the world. It has now arrived in Ireland, where it was officially opened in the Eyre Square Centre in Galway last night. The categories range from "Spot News" to "Portraits" "Science and Technology" and "The Arts". There is also an international children's jury which selects the winner in the "Children's" category. This year's winner depicts the dramatic rescue of one year old Cassandra Gomez during a flood caused by Hurricane Hortense in Puerto Rico. Cassandra, who is wearing a nappy, clutches the nose of one of her rescuers (her mother and three siblings were swept away by the rising water and did not survive).
Another haunting picture depicts a very different kind of rescue as Lebanese civilian Ibrahim Alayan - open mouthed and bloody lipped - is pulled out of the rubble of his former home after it was hit by a missile during the 16 day long pounding of Lebanon by Israel in April 1996. The picture was taken by French photographer Karim Daher and won first prize for a single photo in the "Spot News" category.
But not all the photos capture traumatic moments in disastrous times. Winner of the third prize for a series of photos in the `People Stories" category is a wonderful shot of a group of Romany children on a cart chuckling admiringly at their rearing horse, taken by Yves Leresche. There is a quirky portrait of the US athlete, Olympic goldmedallist Gail Devers, taken by Joseph McNally, posing with malevolent false fingernails as she flexes her impressive bicep.
Neil Burgess, chairman of the 1997 jury, gives the viewer some insight into the priorities of the international nine person judging panel when they were trawling through the stacks of submissions to find the winner: "Having viewed the world of 1996 in photographs, having considered the tribulations and horrors, I believe that this year's jury came to the decision that they wanted a picture which speaks not just of the past, but of the future. And what better symbol of the future than a child? If Zizola's picture makes people think again about the inheritance of the nine million uncharted land mines which we are leaving to our children, then something will have been achieved."
