Of Photos and Real Lives

The World Press Photo exhibit held at the Paseo Marina at the Ayala Center Cebu culminated yesterday. The images communicated by the press photographers absolutely conveyed a powerful message with regards world history. The images brought us into real lives and concerns, allowing us to discover the story they tell the world.

World Press Photo is known for organizing the world's largest and most prestigious annual press photography contest. The winning photographs are assembled into a traveling exhibition right after the contest. Photography has always enthralled me, so you can just imagine how excited I was when I knew that the winning images are brought here in Cebu City. This was quite an opportunity to all the Cebuanos to look up close these beautifully captured images that tell an equally beautiful story.

A color image that shows the emaciated fingers of a one-year-old child pressed against the lips of his mother at an emergency feeding clinic in Niger won as World Press Photo of the Year 2005. The picture was taken in Tahoua, northwestern Niger, on August 1, 2005 by Canadian photographer Finbarr O'Reilly of Reuters.

World Press Photo jury chairman James Colton described the winning image: "This picture has haunted me ever since I first saw it two weeks ago. It has stayed in my head, even after seeing all the thousands of others during the competition. This image has everything - beauty, horror and despair. It is simple, elegant and moving."

Every captured winning image that was on display, with all its power and authenticity, told us a diverse story we will never forget. The winning images included the grieving relatives surrounding the corpse of a child; a man shouting for help at the scene of a truck-bomb explosion; and a father holding his son who is being treated after having his arm amputated in a field hospital.

Founded in 1955, World Press Photo is an independent, non-profit organization with an office in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. It aims to support professional press photography on an international scale. A yearbook presenting all prizewinning entries is published annually in six languages.

Photographers, to quote Jonathan Klein, co-founder and CEO of Getty Images, which has supported photojournalism for five years, "do not need words." The photojournalists all over the world truly deserve our admiration and applause. Certainly, a picture paints a thousand words.