The 27th edition of the Luis Valtueña International Humanitarian Photography Award comes to the OnPhoto Festival, which this year focuses its theme on human rights, to showcase the award-winning works from the last edition of the competition, which presents the results of 743 entries, 6618 photographs from 96 countries around the world.
Forgotten armed conflicts, such as those in Ethiopia or Myanmar, the rural exodus and its environmental impact that has left elderly people abandoned after the neglect of public administrations, or the deaths and disappearances on the migratory route of many people who try to reach Europe by sea for a better world, are some of the stories that are documented in this exhibition and that will leave no one indifferent.
A competition that rewards photographic excellence, but at the same time, rigour, professionalism and ethics during the coverage of their work with a humanitarian focus. The award comes to the Onphoto festival for the second consecutive year with the collaboration of the Directorate of External Action of the Junta de Castilla y León.
This exhibition, which will be on display from 3 to 27 May at the Palacio de la Audiencia in Soria, was inaugurated on 3 April with the presence of Anna Surinyach, finalist and prize-winner for her series Mar de Luto (Sea of Mourning), to stir the consciences of those who are unaware of these realities.
The exhibition is headed by Siegfried Modola, author of the winning series of this edition: Inside Myanmar’s armed revolution, which makes visible the conflict in Myanmar, a country that prohibits journalists from covering the civil war since its armed forces ousted the democratically elected government in February 2021.
Spanish photographer Adra Pallón, Argentinean photographer Eduardo Soteras and Spanish photographer Anna Surinyach have been shortlisted as finalists. Pallón, with her work Demotanasia, highlights the social and environmental problems of the rural exodus in Spain. Soteras presents his series Tigray: Ethiopia sinks into chaos, a work on a forgotten conflict in which he denounces the story of the people who are trapped between the sides in a conflict. Surinyach tackles the drama of the deaths in transit through the Mediterranean through the work Mar de luto (Sea of Mourning).
