I put my hands forward: La photo from the year 2024or the one that has just been awarded this nomination by the jury of World Press Phototaken in Gaza by Mohammed Salem, is intense, iconic, and perfectly – yet tragically – “on point”. Yet there is something that, when I see it, emerges despite me and reduces its impact: I’ve already seen it once, twice, ten, many times. And of these – it should be underlined – several in the past editions of this “Oscar” of photojournalism.
Let’s make it short: this and the other photos I’m talking about lead straight to the icon of icons: the Pietà (everyone knows that of Michelangelo in St. Peter’s), which has always represented the maximum and unnatural pain, that of a mother holding her dead son in her arms (just like Christ taken down from the cross into Mary’s arms). Representation which, let it be clear, is not only linked to Christianity, but is universal and very earthly.
Photography, over time, has repeatedly directed the viewer’s emotions towards this topos of the collective imagination, and not just photojournalism. They range from Tomoko, sick, lovingly cared for by her mother in “Minamata” by W. Eugene Smith, to Courtney Love holding a lookalike of Kurt Cobain as the dead husband, crazy photo by David LaChapelle. In the middle, various photos of the year at WPP that they have the same mode, what changes are the wars or the facts that determined them. And what also changes, year after year, the juries of this competition internationalwhich seem to respond to a sort of automatism: where people fight and die, they find no more effective image than the one which – by dint of seeing it and seeing it again in always similar forms – ends up losing strength with the risk of appearing like a shortcut to an “easy win”.
I ask myself, as a photographer and as an observer: but there really is no less obvious image equally powerful and capable of telling us the unspeakable pain and the disgusting injustice absurdly inflicted on those who simply would live in peace?
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