26 sep Alfred Fried Photography Award 2018
Geplaatst op 14:06h
in
Awards
door Selma van der Bijl
Extremely honored and grateful to be one of the five winners of the Alfred Fried Photography Award with my series ‘Lucky’ about refugee family reunification. The families are from conflict-torn places like Syria, Eritrea, Iraq and Yemen. With my project I would like to show that refugees are people: real men, women, children, fathers, mothers, sons and daughters. They are human beings, like me, like you, like anyone else. Not just numbers and statistics or a problem that needs to disappear. Behind every single number is a human story, worth sharing and honoring.
The work of photojournalists has always helped make people aware of the need for and rewards of a life of peace. Regrettably they usually achieved this with pictures of the opposite – war and hunger. The Alfred Fried Photography Award goes to those photographs that best express the idea that our future can only be peaceful coexistence. In total 16.610 images have been submitted by 5.114 photographers from 137 countries. The award ceremony took place in the Austrian Parliament in Vienna, where the 5 winners (from the USA, Argentina, Sweden, Iran and the Netherlands) were invited and received a medal.
I am incredibly grateful for the trust I have received from the families who voluntarily participated in my project. It is very satisfying to tell such an urgent story and to make the families happy with the photos as well. It's an honor to be invited into people's lives to capture important events and to document these intimate reunifications. This series is a tribute to the courageous people who left everything behind and risked their lives on perilous journeys; endless trips by boat, by road, by bus, by train and on foot, crossing borders and the Mediterranean sea. After years apart, the families are finally reunited with there loved ones. They are the lucky ones who survived. This medal is for you!
To view my entry please visit:
https://www.friedaward.com/index.php/winners/winners-2018/lucky-w