World Press Picture (WPP) prize winner Mikhail Tereshchenko, a employees photographer for the Russian state-controlled media outlet TASS, is now not welcome on the group’s award ceremony after Georgian journalists accused WPP of reinforcing Russian propaganda.
Tereshchenko received the WPP’s prestigious annual regional award final month for a sequence of images capturing final 12 months’s historic anti-government protests within the Georgian capital, Tbilisi. Demonstrators within the nation, which emerged as an unbiased state when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, took to the streets early final November to protest the pro-Russia ruling occasion’s obstruction of Georgia’s efforts to affix the European Union and its broadly disputed election outcomes.
Like different WPP prize recipients, Tereshchenko had been invited to attend an award ceremony held through the opening of a world touring exhibition that includes the winners’ work.
However given backlash from Georgian journalists who level to TASS’s lack of editorial independence as an insult to the very anti-authoritarian motion the company’s images seize, the WPP introduced that Tereshchenko can be excluded from the April 18 occasion, citing “the increased tensions on the European continent.” Tereshchenko additionally reportedly referred to Russia’s 2022 violent siege and ongoing occupation of town of Mariupol as an act of “liberation” in an interview final month, a viewpoint the WPP mentioned it doesn’t agree with.
The group didn’t rescind the photographer’s award, and his work will nonetheless be included in an exhibition touring Europe, North America, and South America for the subsequent 12 months.
Georgian journalist Aleksandre Keshelashvili, who was detained and severely overwhelmed by riot police throughout an anti-government protest, decried WPP’s determination to award Tereshchenko the prize.
“The demonstrators in the award-winning photographs are people fighting back against the very same forces that TASS protects and serves,” Keshelashvili wrote in a March 29 assertion on Fb. “This decision undermines independent media and amplifies propaganda, and allows false narratives to gain broader acceptance.”
The competitors’s jurors mentioned the pictures captured an “important global story” as mass protests erupted in Georgia.
WPP, in an April 1 assertion, mentioned the pictures had been judged anonymously, which means that jury members didn’t know the identification of the photojournalists nor their connected media retailers.
The group mentioned it’s going to “look to improve” its guidelines for entries from state-controlled companies and seek the advice of photographers working underneath “oppressive regimes.”
Jurors mentioned the sequence featured an “important global story” and that the night time images captured pro-European Union protesters’ use of fireworks as a “new urban weapon” in self-defense in opposition to police.
TASS Director Andrey Kondrashov mentioned the rescinded invitation signaled broader European “Russiaphobia.”
In the identical assertion saying its determination to disinviteTereshchenko, WPP additionally apologized for its competitors jury’s classification of a picture of a Ukrainian soldier conscripted to serve in Russian forces (“Underground Field Hospital” by Nanna Heitmann for the New York Instances) and a photograph of a six-year-old Ukrainian woman affected by panic assaults (“Beyond the Trenches” by Florian Bachmeier) as a “visual pair.”
Throughout protests like those captured by Tereshchen for TASS, in keeping with the Committee to Defend Journalists and Reporters With out Borders, Georgian authorities engaged in widespread police brutality in opposition to journalists with impunity.
World Press Picture, a Netherlands nonprofit group, has acknowledged a number of the most ubiquitous photographs of struggle and atrocity since its first award cycle in 1955, together with Related Press photographer Nick Ut’s monumental 1972 picture of nine-year-old Phan Thị Kim Phúcas fleeing a napalm assault.
Final 12 months, the press competitors acknowledged Reuters photographer Mohammad Salem’s picture of a Palestinian girl clutching the physique of her niece killed by an Israeli airstrike with its highest honor of Picture of the Yr.
