| | | |  | | | Peace Image of the Year 2021
Maggie Shannon, Joy 2021, from the series Extreme pain, but also extreme joy
© Maggie Shannon/ Global Peace Photo Award | | | | Peace Image of the Year 2021 | | | | | Global Peace Photo Award 2021 | | | | | | | |  | | | | | | | | | |  | | | | Global Peace Photo Award 2021 awarded at the Austrian Parliament | | | Maggie Shannon wins the "Peace Photo of the Year" at the Global Peace Photo Award 2021. The American photographer won with an image from her reportage "Extreme pain, but also extreme joy" about home births in the USA during the pandemic.
Vienna, 21 September 2021 – this evening, the winners of the international Global Peace Photo Award competition were awarded at the Austrian Parliament with the Alfred Fried Peace Medal for the ninth time:
Nate Hofer for "One and a half acres"
Shabana Zahir for "Our journey"
Derrick Ofusu Boateng for "Peace and Strength"
Snezhana von Büdingen for "Meeting Sofie"
Maggie Shannon for "Extreme pain, but also extreme joy" | | | | | |  | | | Maggie Shannon, from the series Extreme pain, but also extreme joy
© Maggie Shannon/ Global Peace Photo Award | | | The main Peace Image of the Year 2021 prize of 10,000 euros went to American photographer Maggie Shannon for her reportage on home births in Los Angeles during the first lockdown in spring 2020.
The hospitals are flooded with covid patients. In the maternity wards spouses are not allowed. Many women want to give birth at home. Without mask, with the fathers. They are afraid of the hospitals. They are in panic. The midwifes receive emergency calls. In this situation Margaret Shannon decides to accompany four of these midwives. She is impressed with the calm and decisiveness of these women. With their experience. And she is elated by those moments when all the pain has been overcome and the private happiness simply drowns out all the knowledge of the global pandemic. Bodily contact in times of a contact ban! New life in times of the big death. Holding close. Embracing. Helping. A father kissing his new-born, almost as if lost in prayer. It is a picture of a deep peace in a time of thousands of unpeaceful events. And in addition like a small pointer to Black Lives Matter, in a country that in 2020 was still governed by a president specializing in unpeace, in tantrums, gloating, contempt and slander. | | | | | |  | | | Children’s Peace Image of the Year 2021:
Aadhyaa Aravind Shankar, Lap of Peace (Im Schoß des Friedens)
© Aadhyaa Aravind Shankar/ Global Peace Photo Award | | | The best peace image in the children's and youth category, Children's Peace Image of the Year 2021, worth 1000 euros, was won by 7-year-old Aadhyaa Aravind Shankar.
This picture shows her mother resting in the lap of her reading mother. Both women are framed by plants that provide freshness. From outside a cooling breeze comes in. Whether still a child or long grown up, Aadhyaa is convinced: Everyone finds peace in such moments. Finds safety and relaxation. Has an opportunity to forget all hardship. | | | | | |  | | | Nate Hofer: from the series "One and a half acres"
© Nate Hofer/ Global Peace Photo Award | | | Nate Hofer: "One and a half acres"
American photographer Nate Hofer looks through the eye of his camera drone with great joy on this version of "swords to ploughshares". A transition from military to civil. They look peaceful, these rectangular pieces of landscape in the American Midwest. Farming land, parking for scrapped cars, area of wild growth, church square, forest, harvesting yard. But beneath them used to be hidden what could once have brought the death of millions: 450 launching platforms for intercontinental ballistic missiles, aimed at the Soviet Union. They were constructed from 1962 onwards. In Missouri, in Montana, in South and North Dakota. Mostly far from larger settlements. And far enough north to be able to reach not only Russia but also China. A massive potential threat in Cold War times. The end for these platforms of destruction came when US president George W. Bush and Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev managed to agree in 1991 on the so-called START treaty: an agreement to at least reduce their nuclear weapons arsenal. Once the missile launch facilities had been dismantled, the land was sold back to the farmers, sometimes for 600, sometimes for 12 000 US dollars. | | | | | |  | | | Shabana Zahir from the series„Our journey“
© Shabana Zahir/ Global Peace Photo Award | | | Shabana Zahir: "Our journey"
In a very direct way, a young woman, so far completely unknown in the photography community, has translated her thoughts and feelings into pictures. It is Shabana Zahir, born in 1998 in Baghlan in northern Afghanistan. Her father left the family when she was very young. When she was 16, her mother decided to flee the war with Shabana and two siblings. To set out for peace. Shabana Zahir. In Farsi her surname means "belonging to the night". It was at night that her flight began. It lasted for months. Across borders, barbed wire, mountains. Afghanistan, Iraq, Turkey. In Turkey Shabana worked as a waitress in a small restaurant and learned the language. Then she came to Greece on a boat. In the hope of getting to Western Europe, to Germany, along the route through the Balkans. A hope so far dashed. The refugee camp of Diavata near Thessaloniki. Two years of agony. Feeling wordless and useless. Until the small NGO Una mano per un Sorriso, a hand for a smile, introduced Shabana to photography. To a new way of expressing herself. To speaking in pictures. | | | | | |  | | | Derrick Ofusu Boateng, from the series „Peace and Strength“
© Derrick Ofusu Boateng/ Global Peace Photo Award | | | Derrick Ofusu Boateng: "Peace and Strength"
Derrick Ofusu Boateng from Ghana is someone who loves Africa and its cultures. Who does not agree with our solidified image of Africa from news and films. He is someone who wants to emphatically celebrate the strength of the Africans. Their poetry. So he set out with his mobile camera, quite simply, as he says. Of course, he composes his pictures. Uses colour generously. Wants beauty. Wants a personal victory over the everyday struggle. He celebrates play. He photographs and paints at the same time. He celebrates pride. He celebrates lightness. For the jury of the Global Peace Photo Award, Derrick Ofusu Boateng, who decided against becoming a doctor or a lawyer, stands for a whole generation of young African photographers who teach us not to make ourselves comfortable in our traditional ideas of Africa. And not to forget that, beyond South Sudan and Boko Haram in Nigeria and war in Yemen and corruption in Tanzania, there is another Africa whose people dream of exactly the same things as we do: the big freedom to be carefree and live in harmony. | | | | | |  | | | Snezhana von Büdingen, from the series "Meeting Sofie"
© Snezhana von Büdingen/ Global Peace Photo Award | | | Snezhana von Büdingen: "Meeting Sofie"
Snezhana von Büdingen who was born in Perm in Russia and lives in Bonn got to know Sofie in autumn 2017, at the home of the girl, then 18 years old, a farmstead dating back to the 16th century in the village of Eilenstedt in the federal land of Sachsen-Anhalt. A fairy-tale garden, a house full of antiques and old paintings. It is like out of a different era, says the photographer, dreamy, harmonic, full of peace. And in it this special young woman. Self-assured, at peace with herself, who likes pretty clothes, is in love with a young man, gripped by lovesickness, secure in her family. In transition from child to adult, with all that entails in searching and trying things out and small dramas. Snezhana von Büdingen at first documented the intimate love between mothers and their children with Down syndrome in a series of portraits taken in a studio in Cologne. But the vitality and diversity of her intimate long-term project with Sofie makes her hope to take down the "imaginary boundaries" between us and the life of the others. Boundaries made of "prejudices and ignorance". We people, she says, "definitely need more acceptance, more integration, more love." And she recognizes herself in Sofie. In Sofie’s need for freedom and rebellion, too, which alternates with quiet and almost magical moments.
16.396 images from 114 countries were submitted to the Global Peace Photo Award 2021. Most of the entries came from India, Russia, USA, Germany and Iran. The entries were judged by a prestigious international jury consisting of photographers, journalists and representatives of photo associations.
The Global Peace Photo Award is organized by Edition Lammerhuber in partnership with Photographische Gesellschaft (PHG), UNESCO, the Austrian Parliament, the Austrian Parliamentary Reporting Association, the International Press Institute (IPI), the German Youth Photography Award and the World Press Photo Foundation.
The Award is inspired by Austrian pacifist and author Alfred Hermann Fried (* 11 November 1864, Vienna; † 4 May 1921, Vienna). As founder of the journal Die Waffen nieder! (Lay down your arms!) and other peace activities, Fried received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1911, together with Tobias Michael Carel Asser (* 28 April 1838, Amsterdam; † 29 July 1913, The Hague), organizer of the first International The Hague Peace Conference and instigator of the Permanent Court of Arbitration.
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