World Press Photo, Italy's Marco Gualazzini among five finalists to chronicle migrant crisis in Africa

There is also an Italian photographer among the five finalists vying to win the 2019 World Press Photo of the Year, the world’s most important award for photojournalism, inaugurated in 1955. He is Marco Gualazzini (Parma, 1976), a photojournalist with the Contrasto agency, whose work has followed the humanitarian crisis of migrants in Africa, specifically in the Lake Chad area. He is nominated for the prize with a photo entitled Almajiri Boy: the jury appreciated the fact that Gualazzini’s work takes us “to the roots of the great refugee crisis,” and the fact that the photo makes us think and forces us to reflect on the causes that lead so many people to leave their lands.

Gualazzini could be the third Italian to win World Press Photo of the Year: before that, only Pietro Masturzo succeeded in 2010, with a photo capturing women’s protests in Iran against President Ahmadinejad, and Francesco Zizola in 1997, with a shot of landmine victims in Angola. The photographer from Parma will face off with Catalina Martin-Chico, a French-Spanish photographer who portrayed a pregnant former Colombian FARC guerrilla, Australian Chris McGrath who offers an image related to the disappearance of Arab journalist Jamal Khashoggi, U.S. photographer John Moore who captured a crying baby girl at the U.S.-Mexico border as a customs officer searches her mother, and South African Brent Stirton who portrays a woman belonging to Zimbabwe’s anti-poaching forces.

Marco Gualazzini is also in the running for another award, the new World Press Story of the Year, established this year to honor photos with a more narrative flavor and capable of “allowing us to be more thoughtful and careful in the way we tell stories,” as Paul Mokley, one of the members of the jury, put it. Gualazzini competes with the shot The Lake Chad Crisis, which depicts some migrant women in the Lake Chad area. The trio of finalists is rounded out by another Italian, Lorenzo Tugnoli (also from the Contrasto agency), whose photo Yemen Crisis documents Yemen’s war, and Dutchman Pieter ten Hoopen, with The Migrant Caravan, a photo that captures a portion of the long caravan of migrants that crossed Central America to reach the United States.

All the photos and the jury’s motivations can be read on the World Press Photo website. The winners will be revealed on April 11, and from the 13th the photographs will be displayed as usual in an exhibition that will tour the world (first stop in Amsterdam).

Pictured is Almajiri Boy, the shot with which Marco Gualazzini is competing for the prize.

World Press Photo, Italy's Marco Gualazzini among five finalists to chronicle migrant crisis in Africa

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