World Press Photo Exhibit

The World Press Photo exhibit rolls out of BCE Place this Sunday, so I decided to check it out yesterday during my lunch break.

Yeah, that photo I've posted sucks and I later noticed this guy in the picture who was staring at me...like taking a picture at BCE Place was weird or something. I like the ceiling, it's kinda cool, I think.

Anyways, a lot of the images were pretty gut-wrenching. If you click on the link, you can actually check out the winners' gallery. But the coolest part of the site is being able to take a look at 50 years worth of winning entries and when you start going through them, you actually recognize a lot of them. They're iconic images and it hits you that over the last 50 years, there's been war, famine, disease, and fucked up weather conditions year after year. Someone, somewhere, is living through hell at this very minute.

All of them had some sort of impact on me, but if you click on the winning image from 1980, that's the one that stuck with me. It's of these two hands --- one of a severely malnourished child and the other of a healthy aid worker. If you read the blurb, you learn that the photographer didn't even want to enter. He was furious because the magazine he shot this image for just sat on it for five months and opted to submit it into this competition, instead. How sick is that?

But then again, it could be said that this image, becoming the winning entry for 1980, is joining a whole list of images that define certain points in our collective history. Does a picture really have the power to change the way we think? It should, but if it did, we wouldn't have to bear witness to heartbreaking, disturbing "winning" images each year in the World Press Photo gallery.