World Press Photo 2024, the shot of the year is the “Gaza Pieta”

“The Pieta of Gaza”. This is how the photo of was renamed a Palestinian woman, crouching on the ground, holding close to her, almost cradling it, the body wrapped in a white shroud of her granddaughter who died in an Israeli attack in the Gaza Strip. The picture of the Palestinian Reuters photojournalist, Mohammed Salem, has won the 2024 edition of the most important photojournalism award in the world, the World Press Photo. The photo of the year. Although it does not show the faces of the two subjects, it recalls, in its drama, Michelangelo’s masterpiece. A two-dimensional image which, according to many observers, could become a statue, a monument capable of representing the drama of this tragic war.

Taken on October 17, 2023 at Nasser Hospital in Gaza, just ten days after the start of the conflict, the photo portrays Inas Abu Maamar, a 36 year old woman, wearing a blue dress, which recalls the color associated with the Madonna’s mantle, as she embraces the lifeless body of Saly, her five-year-old niece, covered by a white sheet, a symbol of innocence and purity, killed together with her mother and a sister by an Israeli missile. about their home in Khan Yunis.

“It is a deeply moving image,” said jury president Fiona Shields. “Once you see it, it sticks in your mind. It’s like a kind of literal and metaphorical message about the horror and futility of conflict” and represents “an incredibly powerful argument for peace”. The jury, in its motivation, underlined the care and respect with which the reporter took the image, which “offers a look, at the same time, metaphorical and literal into an unimaginable loss and pain”.​

Salem – that more than 10 years ago he received a World Press Photo award for another depiction of the human toll of the conflict in the Gaza Strip – he met the woman, crouched on the floor, hugging the little girl, in the hospital morgue, at a time when many residents had gone there to look for their missing relatives, victims of the bombs. He did it shortly after his wife gave birth, so that moment was “full of strength and sadness at the same time”: “This image sums it up the broader sentiment of what happened in the Gaza Strip.”

Regarding the other sections, the South African Lee-Ann Olwage, for the magazine Geo, won the “Story of the Year” award with her intimate portrait of a Malagasy family living with an elderly parent suffering from dementia. “This story addresses a universal health issue through the lens of family and care,” the judges said. “The series of images is composed with warmth and tenderness, reminding audiences of the love and intimacy needed in times of war and aggression around the world,” they added.

Venezuelan photographer Alejandro Cegarra won the long-term project award with his Black and white images of migrants and asylum seekers attempting to cross Mexico’s southern border, taken for the New York Times/Bloomberg. Also a migrant, Cegarra “offered a sensitive and human-centered perspective”, highlighting, according to the jury, the resilience of those who move, leaving their homeland for others. In the “open format” category, Ukrainian Julia Kochetova won with her website which “combines photojournalism with the personal documentary style of a diary to show the world what it means to live with war as an everyday reality.”

The winning photos in 2024 were selected from 61,062 entries, submitted by 3,851 photographers from 130 countries. The photos will be exhibited in the Nieuwe Kerk church in Amsterdam funtil July 14th. As usual, other exhibitions will travel around the world, in various locations. To reread and reflect on a year of facts and stories. With the power of images.

In Italy, first stop in Rome, from 8 May to 9 June at Palazzo delle Esposizioni.