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Between news and art: photos symbol of a bittersweet of 2009

Posted on May 18, 2010 by dawn

On the roof of a house in Tehran, a woman with her hands to her mouth, shouting his dissent to the result of the elections, despite a charge of electoral fraud, he decreed the victory of Ahmadinejad. It is the moment after the formalization of the outcome but, above all, is the first of a series of violence that bloody the city for days, the portrait by Peter Masturzo, chosen as’ picture of the year “by the jury in the latest edition World Press Photo, which celebrates the best shots and authors of international photojournalism. Among news, art, newspaper, sports, nature and portraits, the works of 63 photographers for a winning total of 23 nationalities, gathered in the exhibition “World Press Photo 2010, until June 6 at the Museum of Rome in Trastevere, in an attempt provide an overview of the most important events of the past and at the same time, through them, telling the philosophy of photojournalism, is constantly evolving to keep pace with current events.
Faced with a reality characterized by aberrant and absurd violence, photography to document the fact choose to go over and make a paradigm on which to meditate. No answer then, but countless questions left open to push the viewer to reflect on its role as a witness and request emotional and civic participation, made possible by an impact shock in the space of a click and a glance cancel each geographical distance and time. Thus the action becomes thought and action in this new interpretation slower and aware of a tabloid which often leaves no time to decide and understand. In “hindsight”, achieved by the crystallization of the moment, seem to rest the perception of the present and the projection of the future. So the question photojournalism, with the aim of investigating the most intimate nature of human beings who look at one. Before run targets and flow of war victims, including children, and impairments of veterans, the white phosphorus bombs, banned by international conventions but dropped on Gaza City, and the heroic gesture of the American soldier who attacked comrades to reach , rushes out, rifle in hand, wearing only boxers.
Well that war is being fought on city streets, with the corpse of a young drug dealer killed in Colombia or that of a man stoned for adultery in Mogadishu. Still, the images of slaughterhouses in Umbria and violence, more natural, that animals use against their fellow for homeland defense or for food. In a perfect dialogue, to delineate different types of discomfort, the path alongside pictures of anorexia than those of despair of a village in Gonarezhou National Park in Zimbabwe, whose inhabitants, from hunger, kill an elephant to the bone and tear it apart. The violence is even in the physicality of the sport, with a predilection for those extremes, and colorful images of some oranges contaminated by cadmium. Still life, aesthetics, and concept. In many shots, not missing Rome, with several faces, the chronicle of portraits of the Roma of Casilino 900, before the eviction, the poetry of starlings in flight, with their games, they seem to make abstract paintings, revealing the ‘ art – and magic – to be able to watch.