The winning shots

171 years of brilliant photo journalism: Canon applauds it's memorable partnership with the straits times.

SPOT NEWS, THIRD PRIZE, SINGLES: Smoke, dust and flames rising over Tilsehir hill near the Turkish border on Oct 23, 2014, after a US-led airstrike against Islamic State militants who had been laying siege to the Kurdish town of Kobane. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said at the time that 200 Iraqi Kurd peshmerga fighters would travel through Turkey to the flashpoint border town. PHOTO: BULENT KILIC, TURKEY/ AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

FIRST PRIZE, SPORTS CATEGORY, STORIES: Spectators with ground tickets finding creative ways of watching the play on Court 12 at the Wimbledon Championships. Spectators unable to secure tickets to any of the major show courts at the championships may make do with a Grounds Admission pass. This entitles them to wander around outside the tennis courts where there are unreserved seats and standing is allowed. Even so, capacity is limited and at times spectators may be admitted only when others leave. Most players, except the top seeds, can at some point during the championships be seen playing on the outside courts. PHOTO: KIERAN DOHERTY, IRELAND

SECOND PRIZE, GENERAL NEWS CATEGORY, STORIES: School uniforms belonging to three of the missing girls in Nigeria. In her school notebook, Hauwa Nkeki wrote a letter to her brother: "Dear Brother Nkeki, Million of greetings goes to you, thousand to your friend, zero to your enemies." Hauwa is one of the nearly 300 girls kidnapped by Boko Haram Islamic militants on April 14, 2014, from their school dormitory in Chibok, a remote village in northern Nigeria. Boko Haram, which translates roughly to “Western education is sinful”, believes girls should not be in school and boys should learn only the Quran. For years, the group had been razing villages, using forced recruitment and carrying out an insurgency. Many thousands have died and the region has been devastated, but no one took much notice before the girls were kidnapped. In May 2014, a hashtag campaign (#BringOurGirlsBack) went viral on Twitter. Within a week, it had attracted over two million tweets. A media frenzy began and coverage of the protests was extensive. But what has been missing from most of the coverage is the girls themselves. It has since been reported that 57 girls escaped but 219 remain missing. Media reports say some girls have become fighters and were carrying out suicide missions for the group. PHOTO: GLENNA GORDON, USA, FOR TIME/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

SECOND PRIZE, LONG-TERM PROJECTS, STORIES: Pilot and photographer Kacper Kowalski’s documentary project “Side Effects” is about the complex relationship between humans and nature. The photos were shot either from a paraglider or a gyroplane, some 150m above the ground, mainly in the area around Gdynia, in Poland, where Mr Kowalski lives. In this work, he explores answers to questions that deeply interest him: What is the natural environment for humans? Is it an untouched, virgin landscape? Or is it a landscape that has changed and adapted to human needs? Mr Kowalski sees his work as offering a graphic and sometimes-abstract portrait of how civilisation came into being. PHOTO: KACPER KOWALSKI, POLAND/PANOS PICTURES

SECOND PRIZE, GENERAL NEWS CATEGORY, SINGLES: Refugees crowding a boat 32km north of Libya before being rescued by an Italian naval frigate on June 7, 2014, as part of a campaign called “Mare Nostrum”. The rescue operation was put in place by the Italian government after hundreds of migrants drowned in 2013 off the coasts of Sicily and Malta. In 2014, some 170,000 people were rescued and taken to Italy. PHOTO: MASSIMO SESTINI/ITALY

SECOND PRIZE, NATURE, STORIES: A colony of ants lives inside the stem of this plant, foraging inside the pitcher for insects. They are resistant to the plant’s digestive juices, and can swim in the liquid without being harmed. The ants take only large insects, which would disrupt the digestive chemistry of the pitcher if they were not removed. PHOTO: CHRISTIAN ZIEGLER, GERMANY/GEO

FIRST PRIZE, DAILY LIFE CATEGORY, SINGLES. Yi villagers holding a cattle market in a forest near Liangshan in Sichuan province in November 2014. The Yi ethnic minority live largely by agriculture, livestock herding and hunting. There are around 7.5 million Yi in China, mainly in Sichuan and Yunnan provinces. PHOTO: CAI SHENG XIANG, CHINA/ FUZHOU PING YI ENVIRONMENTAL ART DESIGN

Updated

Published

Feb 14, 2016, 05:00 AM

The 58th edition of the World Press Photo exhibition is now on at the National Museum of Singapore. Presented by The Straits Times, the exhibition features 145 winning images from the prestigious World Press Photo 2015 contest, which drew 97,912 entries by 5,692 photographers from 131 countries last year. With around 100 local exhibitions every year, the World Press Photo exhibition tour of prize-winning photographs is the most popular travelling photo event in the world. The contest is organised by the World Press Photo Foundation, an independent, non-profit organisation founded in 1955 in the Netherlands. This annual contest is regarded as the "Oscars" of photojournalism. The exhibition is on daily from 10am to 7pm until Feb 21 at the National Museum's Concourse (Level 1) and The Canyon (Basement 1), and is open to the public. Admission is free. There are guided tours every Saturday and Sunday, at 11am and 2pm (limited to 20 people each session, registration is on site). Listen to Straits Times photojournalists Kevin Lim, Neo Xiaobin, Desmond Lim and Alphonsus Chern talk about different aspects of photojournalism in Singapore at 11am and 1pm today. Pre-registration is required and can be done at www.straitstimes.com/tags/st-world-press-photo.

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