Maggie Shannon wins the “Peace Image 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 in the Austrian Parliament, the winners of the international Global Peace Photo Award competition were awarded 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” and
Maggie Shannon for “Extreme pain, but also extreme joy”.
The main prize “Peace Image of the Year 2021”, endowed with 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.
7 years old Aadhyaa Aravind Shankar from India won the Children’s Peace Image of the Year 2021, which was awarded with 1000 euros.
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.
The prize was presented by Gerhard Lahner, Member of the Managing Board and Chief Operations Officer (COO) of Vienna Insurance Group (VIG), which supports this award: “Vienna Insurance Group’s understanding of thinking in and for generations, and thus assuming responsibility, has always determined the core business of our insurance group. Assuming social and cultural responsibility is particularly close to our hearts.”
In his welcome address, Peter Raggl, President of the Austrian Federal Council, the extraordinary cooperation with the Global Peace Photo Award and how important it is to provide a forum for peace in these times.
Lois Lammerhuber, who initiated the Global Peace Photo Award together with his wife Silvia Lammerhuberand has organised it since the beginning, reminded us that “peace is not the absence of war, but something I would like to call a successful life. Every year, the submitted photos and stories touch us anew with their creativity and passion for what is good and peaceful in this world.”
Invited by Barbara Trionfi, Director of the International Press Institute (IPI), Galina Timchenko, founder and director of the Latvian online platform “Meduza.io”, gave a blazing speech for freedom of speech: “This campaign against freedom of speech, against truth and European values does not only concern Russia, it is a direct threat to the whole of Europe. And the only defence we, civil society, can build, the only shield we have, is paper or monitors with texts or photos on them. Free, objective and trustworthy information gives us hope to protect everything we believe in.”
Claudia Dannhauser, Chair of the Association of Parliamentary Editors, editor ORF Zeit im Bild, reflected in her speech on the meaning of peace and that the Global Peace Photo Award makes a wonderful contribution to it: “Peace is a word that triggers different associations and feelings in each of us. Finding the one image that symbolises peace? It is not an easy task. The Global Peace Photo Award has been doing it for years. It is an invaluable contribution to sharpen the view, to raise the importance of peace for all of us – in times when war is commonplace, those affected do not always get quick help and cynicism often wins out over idealism.”
This year’s chair of the 25-member jury Eric Falt, Director UNESCO New Delhi, India, emphasised in his closing keynote on the one hand the high quality of the submitted photos and on the other hand the importance of gender equality: “In our 2021 photo competition, there were so many exceptional images expressing peace. For Picture of the Year, our jury finally chose the moving photos of Maggie Shannon, who documented the work of midwives in Los Angeles during the COVID 19 crisis, unsung heroes of the pandemic who help women bring newborns into our crazy but beautiful world. In fact, three of our award winners this year were photographers who featured women, reminding us that until we achieve gender equality everywhere, there will be no real peace anywhere.”
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. https://www.friedaward.com/jury The jury statements for the total of six awards was formulated by the long-standing GEO editor-in-chief Peter-Matthias Gaede from Hamburg.
In addition to awarding the “Peace Image of the Year” to Maggie Shannon, Alfred Fried Peace Medals 2021 went to:
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: „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: „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: „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 Sophie 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.
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 prize was inspired by the Austrian pacifist and writer Alfred Hermann Fried (*11 November 1864 in Vienna; † 4 May 1921 in Vienna). Fried was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1911 together with the organiser of the Hague Conference on Private International Law Tobias Asser.