The room filled with space and this murmuring preceded the non-celebratory acts until the invitation. On the walls, the pictures are talked about before the discussions begin. Photos that require no attention are required. So I started entrega del 29. Premio Internacional de Fotografía Humanitariana Luis Valtueñaorganized by Doctors of the World, at the Ortega-Marañón Fundación.
After the presentation, the brand was clear. It was not just about rewarding photographic work, it was about reaffirming the form of looking at the world. In a year particularly violent for journalists and aid workers, with numbers that obscenely showed any intention of neutrality. This act insisted on a basic and even less obvious idea, making it necessary to “ir, ver and contar”, as Comrade Beatriz Lecumberri noted.
The Luis Valtueña Award was created to honor four Asian collaborators in the 1990s for helping civilians in armed conflicts, photographers Mercedes, Manuel, Flors and Luis Valtueña. Cases three years later, this origin continues to mark the way. It is not an escape from visual perfection, but rather a space where photography is understood as an ethical tool, as testimony and as memory.
Survivors of Syrian prisons yearn for their freedom, marked by years of detention and violence.
Syria
Your parents have seen a recognizable map this year and an uncomfortable one once in a while. Syria, Gaza, Afghanistan and Paiporta. Four different scenarios explored by the same question of what can and should be done in photoperiodism when violence becomes structural.
ganador project, Shadows hold your nameSamuel Nacar, articulates this map from the darkest core. The footage goes through the Syrian prison system under the rule of Bashar al-Assad. Sednaya appears not as an icon, but as a system. Cells, hospitals, archives, bodies that endured torture and gestures that persisted even after liberation.
There is no visual excess or drama. Hay huellas. A man who, for free, accepts without courage the position in which he slept in prison. Return to the place of caution. Vacancies that are laden with violence. The series doesn’t try to move from the fallout to acknowledging what happened and those who were wrong.
Samuel Nacar cannot be present at the act. During his intervention, I watched a video taken from Algeria, where he found himself at work. I welcomed the award as a way to continue condemning the system of repression and torture used to control the Syrian population, and highlighted “the importance of the fact that there are still spaces that can be used for classic photojournalism of testimony”, in a more hostile context for the office.
Family members watch a man die in Gaza, where food shortages have turned into a daily form of violence.
Gauze
Gaza estuvo present en Eternal deathby young Palestinian photojournalist Jehad Alshrafi. Here hambre is not the context, he is the protagonist. Persons chasing aid trucks, sacks of harina turned into bottles, hearts that shock when comida cae appears in the sky. The organization noted that no bombs were detonated to document the daily deaths in Gaza, just watch the hambre tape. Images are not offered directly. Leave the story open, like a legacy that continues to be active.
In Afghanistan, Valentina Sinis suggested a different time. Let Afghan women reveal their stories moves in intimate spaces. Classrooms, secret shops, places where the sisterhood functions as a refuge. I have a regime that established decades of norms for insulting women in public space, its photographs show daily resistance, minimal gestures supporting appalling identities.
A young girl dresses another woman in an intimate space, one of the few places where Afghan women can express themselves freely.
Afghanistan
El cierre I use Santi Palacios Nadia arrived on timeseries about the floods that devastated Paiport in October 2024. The palaces left the inconvenience to search for him because they were not brought that night. The ensuing frustration and need to document what happens next weighs on the importance of being aware of when things are happening. His pictures show barricades, open houses on the canal and objects thrown on the street, but above all people. And it raised an uncomfortable question about the failure of institutional preparation and the weight of disinformation embedded in well-documented contexts. Information is available whenever it is distributed through channels and filters.
There was also a story for Maria Claussová, the first female winner of the Luis Valtueña Prize, who recently fell in Adamuz. His words, acquired during the act, sounded like a precise synthesis. “Photography as a Tool for Social Transformation and as a Call to Collective Consciousness”. The entire photographic community and family of Doctors of the World brought them home.
Leaving the room, it was clear that none of these images were quickly consumed. In a photo-saturated world, this prize insists on other things, looking into space, remembering those who have been silent, and assuming that there are stories that cannot and should not be silent.
Vecinos after the floods of October 2024 go through the order in Paiporta in front of decades of destroyed cars.
Paiport
Leave a Reply