Issue Reporting Picture Story
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[ ISSUE REPORTING PICTURE STORY ] A long-term project on a single topic. It could focus on science, news, politics or any number of topics, ranging from coverage of a single person to an entire community. The project must convey a deep understanding of the subject. Each submission consists of 10 to 40 images. Each participant is allowed to enter up to 2 submissions. All images must be taken in 2023.
Judges for Issue Reporting Picture Story
Quick links to award categories: Spot News / Portraits / Nature & Environment / Recreational & Traditional Sports / Sports Action / General News / Daily Life / Daily Life Picture Story / Portrait Series / Issue Reporting Picture Story / Cultural Practices / Photographer of the Year, Asia
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There is no separate article on torture in the Russian Criminal Code, there is only an article on abuse of power - Article 286. It has a paragraph on torture, the punishment is up to 15 years of imprisonment. However, according to the data of the human rights organisation "Crew Against Torture" for 2019, the average term of imprisonment under this article is 3.5 years, 43% of those convicted receive only suspended sentences. The system protects its individual representatives. And people who have been in the role of suspects or accused continue to tell stories about how they were persuaded to give the "right" testimony. My photographs are staged shots of ordinary objects placed in everyday conditions. According to the stories of victims of police brutality and materials of criminal cases, similar objects to those depicted were used for torture.
In my country, South Korea, a pressing crisis is unfolding: the disappearance of children. The elementary school I attended is now on the brink of closure due to a drastic decline in student enrollment, which has halved since my time there. Our birth rate is falling more rapidly than in other OECD countries, making it a critical issue. It's alarming how our government and society are not addressing this problem with the urgency it deserves. Amid rampant inflation, soaring housing prices, and increasing marital breakdowns, this issue only becomes more dire. Walking through the streets, I encounter numerous playgrounds, mere minutes apart, in my city near Seoul. Yet, these spaces are eerily void of children. This stark reality inspired my project, No More Children in My Motherland. Capturing images of deserted playgrounds was hauntingly effortless; devoid of their intended users, these vibrant structures stood like functionless sculptures. What were once symbols of hope have become visual representations of a dystopian reality, a sorrowful landscape alarmingly close to my reality. The creative process of this project mirrored a game of hide-and-seek: myself, the photographer, in search of the elusive subjects - the children. This quest began at a playground just 200 feet from my home and expanded to an 18-mile journey to an abandoned amusement park, closed due to financial struggles. Over the course of several months, from late summer to winter and through 25 rolls of film, encounters with children were a rarity. If no effective solutions are implemented, South Korea faces a risk of fading into obscurity. My project represents a personal crusade to report on and halt this impending disaster.
The World Wide Fund for Nature has written in its latest report (Living Planet) that 60% of wildlife has been destroyed since 1970 due to the rapid human use of natural resources. These resources are "green infrastructure" such as water, land, plants and animals. Iran is not an exception to this rule and having many natural resources such as mountains, plains, lakes, all kinds of plant and animal species and fertile agricultural lands that it has had so far, in recent years mostly due to the lack of proper management in preserving The environment, as well as the lack of culture of some people's proper use of natural resources, have lost a large part of them. Iran is a country of four seasons, and this photo collection was taken in different cities of this country in recent years due to the destruction of different climates by human hands. The Forestry Organization announced in mid-2013 that more than two-thirds of Iran's soil, which is about 118 million hectares, is rapidly becoming a desert. It doesn't matter where people are on this earth, they reach for everything for their convenience and indulgence, they dry up the waters, pollute the air, burn the forests, make the animals extinct and finally wear out the soil. And they take their land with all its natural assets to gradual destruction. Masoud Mansour, the former head of Iran's Forests, Ranges and Watershed Organization, announced in a message to the FAO Forestry Committee, "Given the population projections until 2050 and the need for 593 million hectares of new land for agriculture, the continuation of the process of forest destruction and land destruction in parallel, It will continue at the warning level.
After the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, the whole world turned its attention to the region, where the largest war in Europe since World War II was fought. While reports from the front lines have been appearing daily on the pages of the media for more than two years now, I have traveled more than 7,000 kilometers across Russia to see what life inside the country looks like. For me, it is very painful to see what is happening, but It’s important for a local photographer to document history, and for me, this series of photographs has become a snapshot of today's militarized society. Shooting the present, like a photographer, and at the same time, like an ordinary person, I tried to see what the future is. Is it peace or is it war?
In Kazakhstan there is a village called Kalachi and the adjacent mining ghost town of Krasnogorsk. Since 2012, the inhabitants of these places have been falling into a strange state bordering on sleep for several days or even weeks. During the period of "sleep" some of them could continue to do their business without realizing it. Most of the inhabitants during an attack either completely blacked out or remained in a delirious state for a long time. After the seizures, no one remembered anything about the "dream" itself. The most common version of the "dream" — periodic bursts of carbon and carbon monoxide from the bowels of abandoned uranium mines that are located several kilometers from the settlements. In addition to it there are other assumptions, such as the influence of psychotropic paralytic gases, the influence of radon, the use of local farmers of dust, etc... Sleep attacks have been complained about for years, but since 2016, the falling asleep has completely stopped. Despite the fact that more than eight years have passed since the end of this amazing story, there is still no official and scientifically confirmed version of what happened. After falling asleep, most of the inhabitants left their homeland. At the moment there are about a hundred people living in Kalachy and Krasnogorsk. This photo story is about those who remained.
The glass of water I drank every morning
The water bottle I gave my son every day when he went to nursery school
The spring water I drank by scooping it out with my hands
The stream where I caught guppies
The pond where we throw eggs and worship
The school grounds where I play football
Invisible, it has neither smell or taste. Was that substance in the water I drank and touched? In the water we used to grow our vegetables? Is it still in the water that flows out of our faucet now? What harm have these substances, accumulated in my body, done to me and my children? In 2016, it was announced that water supplied to 450,000 people in the central and southern parts of the main island from a water treatment plant located in central Okinawa had been contaminated with organofluorine compounds (PFAS). PFAS are carcinogenic substances known as 'Forever Chemicals', which rarely break down in nature or in the human body. In 2020, a fire alarm in a hangar at Futenma Airbase malfunctioned causing a large amount of firefighting foam to be released into the community of Ginowan. The fluffy foam, which wafted romantically and seemed never to fade, contained PFAS. People tried to grasp the true nature of the water they had taken for granted and retraced fragmented memories of the ‘foam’ they may have seen. This is the story of the PFAS contamination leaked from US military bases in Okinawa told through local people’s memories of the water and land. It is not possible to measure contamination figures of the past. Neither the Japanese government nor the US military have offered any fundamental solutions or even acknowledged the source of contamination. As the reality of the contamination was gradually revealed, the hazy memories of those affected, many overlooked until now, have become distorted. I walked through the contaminated land and water, tracing their memories. Eternal chemicals that cannot be visually captured except as fluffy bubbles. The source of this pollution cannot be reached by any means, blocked by the fences of the airbase. The silent burden of these beautiful islands that visitors dare not look for beyond the pleasant breezes and sound of waves. The invisible has become intertwined and overlapped. Wading through the dreamy aabuku (foam) it remained elusive, I wove together the words and unspoken thoughts of the people I met.
On 1st February 2021 Myanmar’s military carried out a coup which deposed the democratically elected government and shattered a decade of political and social development overnight. Many of the country’s elected officials were detained and Myanmar returned to military rule – something that the vast majority of the population had hoped they would never see again. Protests against the coup quickly began to grow, from small acts of defiance to a nationwide uprising which protestors began referring to as the ‘Spring Revolution’. In order to suppress the growing protest movement the military soon turned to the use of deadly force and mass detention. In the first months of resistance, hundreds of peaceful protestors were murdered, thousands were imprisoned and virtually every town and city in the country was subjected to a brutal campaign of terror by state security forces. As the majority of urban protests were quashed by the military crackdown, many young Burmese retreated into the jungles and mountains of Myanmar’s rugged periphery to join the People’s Defence Force (PDF), the military wing of the National Unity Government (NUG), a body of democratically-elected legislators and officials that is widely accepted by the civilian populace to be the legitimate government of Myanmar. Large swathes of Myanmar’s border regions have been embroiled in civil war for decades and local ethnic populations have long suffered under military repression. The resultant patchwork of self-administered regions protected by mountains, jungles and well established ethnic armed groups is the perfect training ground for a new generation of Burmese freedom fighters.
