Sensational snapshots

The World Press Photo exhibit showcases the year’s most striking images at Loft Project Etagi.

By Luisa Schulz

The St. Petersburg Times

Published: August 22, 2012 (Issue # 1723)

BRENT STIRTON, GETTY IMAGES / NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC Anti-poachers guard an endangered northern white rhino in Kenya.

A woman veiled in black enfolds her wounded adult son in her white-gloved hands, burying his head in her chest. This picture was taken during the demonstrations in Sanaa, Yemen, against president Ali Abdullah Saleh last October and is the winner of the World Press Photo contest 2012, the most important journalism photography contest of the year. As a figurehead, it introduces the other laureate photographs, which are on show in Petersburg at Loft Project Etagi from Aug. 24 through Sept. 16.

The selected photos are not only documents of the previous year’s events, they are windows into the personal worlds hidden behind them.

“What the jury was saying was, really this is about the people,” jury chair Aidan Sullivan said in an official video talking about the Arab Spring and about the jury’s decision process.

“They were looking for something that reflected all of the turbulence, of the turmoil but at the same time was an intimate moment, a personal moment, that showed how it affected the people.”

The Arab Spring is also a popular subject in the remaining 56 photographs, selected from over 100,000 submissions, as was last year’s devastating tsunami in Japan. Expressive Arab faces, ships stranded on buildings and debris dominate the visual vocabulary. The 55th contest also features themes such as Afghanistan, the massacre carried out by Anders Breivik in Norway last summer, evicted Americans and an Alzheimer’s patient, as well as sex workers, the feminist Ukrainian protest group Femen and prison cells in Ukraine.

Included in the gallery of selected photos are also several images captured in Russia. The first prize in the Sports stories category went to Alexander Taran, who photographed Strelka fighters behind the old Krasnoye Znamya factory in St. Petersburg. Strelka is Russian street fighting with no time limit, ending only with a knockout or surrender. Taran’s monochrome study traces the fight from the pre-match cash prize offer to the floor — the title photo focusing in on the eyes and forehead of a fighter looking into viewers’ eyes as if into his opponent’s.

SAMUEL ARANDA / THE NEW YORK TIMES A woman cradles her son after tear gas was used during a demo in Yemen.

Meanwhile, residents relaxing on the steppes of Moscow suburbia are the subjects of Alexander Gronsky’s pictures. By fine-tuning the contrasts between industry, tower blocks, human presence and nature, he manages to capture an idyll in the midst of tower block settings, coming in third with his work “Pastoral” in the Daily Life category.

Another first prize was awarded to Rob Hornstra, who captured pop singers and entertainers in restaurants along the Sochi Riviera in the south of Russia, and was victorious in the Arts and Entertainment category.

Hornstra’s motivation was a search for the Russian identity, which he explored by focusing on the variety of interiors and roles adopted by the singers. “But what’s Russian style? That’s the question that I’m actually asking in this series,” he said in an interview published on the World Press Photo website.

A rather extraordinary image captured in Russia is that of a polar bear making its way down a picturesque cliff in the Arctic archipelago of Novaya Zemlya in search of bird eggs, photographed by Jenny E. Ross. Polar bears, which usually hunt for seals from ice floe platforms, run out of their natural menu when ice floes melt in the summer, making the animals particularly vulnerable to climate change.

“World Press Photo 2012” is on display at Loft Project Etagi from Aug. 24 through Sept. 16 at 74 Ligovsky Prospekt. M. Ligovsky Prospekt. Tel. 458 5005. www.loftprojectetagi.ru.