Winner 2020
Fabio Bucciarelli
Fabio Bucciarelli is an award-winning photographer and author known for his documentation of conflicts and humanitarian consequences of war. In the last decade he has covered extensively the major world changing events in Middle East, Africa, Europe and Central and South America.
Bucciarelli’s documentary works have been recognized with the most prestigious awards in the profession including the Robert Capa Gold Medal, World Press Photo, POY Photographer of the Year, Prix Bayeux for War Correspondents, Days Japan International between other prizes and citations.
Bucciarelli’s images are frequently published in international magazines and newspapers and his photos are exhibited, with solo and group exhibitions, in museum and galleries worldwide and his artworks appears in several collections.
“We Take the Dead From Morning Till Night”
At the moment when the coronavirus was ripping through northern Italy, working on assignment for The New York Times, I gained exclusive access to the Red Cross workers who were going door to door around Bergamo, the hardest hit part of Italy’s hardest hit region, to check on those who were infected and take the worst of them to the hospital.
It was a devastatingly intimate view of the way the coronavirus was tearing apart family after family in the close-knit region. Working cautiously in goggles, gloves and respirator and clothed in a hazmat suit, I traveled with the workers in the ambulance, and entered the bedrooms, living rooms and kitchens of families ravaged by the virus.
The simple surroundings I encountered belied the significance of what Bergamo had become: at that time, ground zero for the coronavirus in all the world.
When the children said good-bye to mothers, fathers and grandparents who were hoisted onto dollies and taken away, no one could know if it was for the last time. The work did not end at the front door, however.
I entered overwhelmed intensive care units and overcrowded hospital corridors lined with Covid-19 patients.
In the most tragic cases the families allowed me to follow them to cemeteries for the pared down yet poignant ceremonies that only the closest relatives could attend.
Runners Up 2020
Chery Dieu Nalio
Chery Dieu Nalio Born in Haiti in 1981. He started shooting in his uncle’s photo studio when he was twenty as a commercial photographer from 2002 to 2004 and Freelance photographer from 2004 to 2010 as he dealt with a local agency named Alerte Haiti.
When former President Jean Bertrand Aristide went to exile in 2004, he decided to show in images the human right abuses and social injustices of people living in the slums.
The 2010 earthquake aftermath saw an increase of all major categories of crimes, including murder, kidnapping and violence of all sorts. When he saw how the authorities treated the victims without any respect of their rights, he decided to pursue a career in photojournalism and joined Associated Press that same year. In 2011 Chery was selected for a full scholarship in a photojournalism workshop in Argentina and then worked in Mexico for Associated Press as a photojournalist for some time in 2012.
In Haiti, where he is currently based for Associated Press, a vast majority of the people are illiterate and photography means more than a thousand words: it’s very strong to convey your message through a picture and Photography documents the daily life of a nation.
“Haiti: Nation On The Brink”
Fuel shortages, rising prices and allegations of government corruption have fueled protests in the impoverished nation of Haiti.
Protesters are angry about skyrocketing inflation and the government’s failure to prosecute embezzlement from a multi-billion Venezuelan program that sent discounted oil to Haiti.
Much of the financial support to help Haiti rebuild after the 2010 earthquake comes from Venezuela’s Petro Caribe fund, a 2005 pact that gives suppliers below-market financing for oil and is under the control of the Haitian central government.
In a year when protests by frustrated citizens swept much of the globe, the grief and tragedy of Haiti was otherwise largely ignored by the international media.
But Chery’s photographs bear sharp, humane witness to the turmoil of a country on the edge of disintegration. It is a story critical to understanding the state of the world today.
Nariman Ayman El-Mofty
Nariman Ayman El-Mofty has been a staff photojournalist for the AP since 2016.
Based in Cairo, she has worked as a staff editor/photographer for AP in the Middle East covering the region based in Cairo.
Her assignments have included news, feature and more in-depth enterprise stories.
Nariman works closely with regional AP editors, bureau staff and text editors for planning coverage of news and enterprise in the region.
“Disembarking in Hell”
With its systematic torture, Ras al-Ara, Lahj, Yemen, is a particular hell on earth for migrants on the arduous, 900-mile (1,400 kilometer) journey from the Horn of Africa to oil-rich Saudi Arabia.
Migrants leave home on sandaled feet with dreams of escaping poverty. They trek through mountains and deserts, sandstorms and 113-degree Fahrenheit temperatures, surviving on crumbs of bread and salty water from ancient wells.
In Djibouti, long lines of migrants descend single file down mountain slopes to the rocky coastal plain, where many lay eyes on the sea for first time and eventually board the boats. Some find their way safely across war-torn Yemen to Saudi Arabia, only to be caught and tossed back over the border.
The lucky ones make it into the kingdom to earn their livings as a servant and laborers. But others are stranded in Yemen’s nightmare — in some measure because Europe has been shutting its doors, outsourcing migrants to other countries.
The European Union began paying Libyan coast guards and militias to stop migrants there, blocking the other main route out of East Africa, through Libya and across the Mediterranean to Europe.
The number of Mediterranean crossings plummeted — from 370,000 in 2016 to just over 56,000 so far this year. Meanwhile, more than 150,000 migrants landed in Yemen in 2018, a 50% increase from the year before, according to the International Organization for Migration.
This year, more than 107,000 had arrived by the end of September, along with perhaps tens of thousands more the organization was unable to track — or who were buried in graves along the trail. And European policies may be making the Yemen route more dangerous.
Funded by the EU, Ethiopia has cracked down on migrant smugglers and intensified border controls. Arrests of known brokers have prompted migrants to turn to unreliable traffickers, taking more dangerous paths and increasing the risk of abuses.
This series chronicles some of these migrants and their dangerous journey.
