World Press Picture (WPP) prize winner Mikhail Tereshchenko, a workers photographer for the Russian state-controlled media outlet TASS, is 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 collection of pictures capturing final 12 months’s historic anti-government protests within the Georgian capital, Tbilisi. Demonstrators within the nation, which emerged as an impartial state when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, took to the streets early final November to protest the pro-Russia ruling get together’s obstruction of Georgia’s efforts to affix the European Union and its extensively disputed election outcomes.
Like different WPP prize recipients, Tereshchenko had been invited to attend an award ceremony held through the opening of a worldwide 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 pictures 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 the 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 following 12 months.
Georgian journalist Aleksandre Keshelashvili, who was detained and severely crushed by riot police throughout an anti-government protest, decried WPP’s resolution 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 images captured an “important global story” as mass protests erupted in Georgia.
WPP, in an April 1 assertion, mentioned the images had been judged anonymously, that means that jury members didn’t know the id of the photojournalists nor their hooked up media shops.
The group mentioned it can “look to improve” its guidelines for entries from state-controlled companies and seek the advice of photographers working beneath “oppressive regimes.”
Jurors mentioned the collection featured an “important global story” and that the evening pictures 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 asserting its resolution 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 Occasions) and a photograph of a six-year-old Ukrainian lady affected by panic assaults (“Beyond the Trenches” by Florian Bachmeier) as a “visual pair.”
Throughout protests like those captured by Tereshchen for TASS, in response to 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 among the most ubiquitous photos of battle 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 12 months.
