We are thrilled to announce that from September 15-17, 2017 Africa Media Online will be playing host to the World Press Photo Exhibition 2017 at the Hilton Arts Festival, the first time in many years that the Exhibition will be presented in KwaZulu-Natal and the first time at the province’s foremost arts festival.
World Press Photo (WPPh) runs the World’s largest professional photojournalism contest. The winning pictures from that competition are included in the World Press Photo Exhibition that travels to a 100 cities in 45 countries and is seen by an audience of over four million people. The exhibition brings to a global audience the very best of photojournalism and visual story telling taken by the World’s foremost professional press, news and documentary photographers. The Exhibition is run according to a strict code of ethics that upholds best practice for press photography.
For the 2017 Contest 5,034 professional photographers entered 80,408 photographs that were adjudicated by specialist juries from many of the World’s leading publications. The World Press Photo Foundation receives support from the Dutch Postcode Lottery and is sponsored worldwide by Canon.
A panoramic of the award ceremony for the 2011 World Press Photo Awards was held at the prestigious Musiekgebouw opera house in Amsterdam, Netherlands. South African photographer, Jodi Bieber won the World Press Photo of the Year Award, that year. In her acceptance speech she made a heartfelt appeal to all in the audience, including editors from some of the foremost global media publications and the Patron of World Press Photo, His Royal Highness Prince Constantijn of The Netherlands, to do everything in their power to secure the release of fellow South African photographer Anton Hammerl who had gone missing in Libya. Sadly, unknown to all present Anton had already passed away from injuries sustained while carrying out his duties as a photojournalist in the conflict zone.
The hosting of the exhibition here in South Africa builds on a relationship we at Africa Media Online have developed over the years with WPPh. In 2009-2010 we were the local partner to WPPh and Freevoice in another Dutch Postcode Lottery funded project called Twenty Ten in which we trained journalists and visual storytellers ahead of the 2010 FIFA World Cup. The output of that project became a special traveling exhibition which was showcased at the V&A Waterfront in Cape Town in 2010. Since then we have worked on a number of projects together large and small. Africa Media Online produced Shutha.org a free resource for professional photographers in the Majority World with support from WPPh and funding from the Dutch Postcode Lottery. I was invited by WPPh to present a workshop for Mozambiquan photographers alongside the World Press Photo Exhibition in Maputo in 2010. I became a nominator for WPPh’s Joop Swart Masterclass and we hosted then-World Press Photo Managing Director, Michiel Munneke, at our first DocuFest Africa festival in 2013. For a number of years though, our collaboration went quiet as most of the senior management at WPPh that we had built relationship with moved on. So when I had the opportunity to travel to Amsterdam in January this year for The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision’s Winterschool for Audiovisual Archiving, I took the opportunity to go and meet the new MD of World Press Photo, Lars Boering, and his associate David Campbell. One thing led to another and the outcome is a fresh collaboration with us jointly bringing the WPPh exhibition to the Hilton Arts Festival along with the second edition of DocuFest Africa.
We have a fabulous line-up for DocuFest Africa 2017 including the only woman African photographer who has ever won the World Press Photo of the Year Award, Jodi Bieber presenting some of her recent work. The mix of the World Press Photo Exhibition 2017 and DocuFest Africa 2017 brings the best of global visual storytelling together with the best of South African visual storytelling, creating a wonderful platform for Africans telling Africa’s story. While it has all come together somewhat at the last minute, I am thrilled that it has come together at all and I trust that we can create enough momentum this year to keep doing this in the years to come adding more elements around the core that nurture African photojournalism and visual storytelling.
Exhibition: The World Press Photo Exhibition 2017
Venue: Raymond Slater Library upstairs in the Centenary Centre at Hilton College
Dates: Friday September 15 – Sunday September 17
Time: Friday and Saturday 9 am – 8:30 pm, Sunday 9 am – 6 pm
Tickets: Tickets are available at the door and NOT from the Hilton Arts Festival ticket office. A ticket gives you entry into the exhibition and all 8 of the DocuFest Africa presentations by leading South Africa photographers and curators.
Charges:
R120 pp for adults
R65 for children under 16 and pensioners with a pensioners card
R40 per child for school groups over 10
Information:
Click here for the World Press Photo Exhibition 2017 programme and ticket information
Click here for the DocuFest Africa 2017 programme and ticket information