By Graeme Murdoch
In the inaugural competition in 1955, the winning World Press Photo of the year was a not very startling picture of a motorcross competitor, tumbling off his bike during the world championships in Denmark.
The following year, the WPP-winning image caught the emotion-riddled face of an 11-year-old child, reunited with her father who had just been released from a Russian prison camp. She last saw her father when she was a one-year-old. This set the challenge to the world’s best photographers for the next 56 years.
Photojournalists – for that is what they are: reporters with cameras – often face difficult dilemmas as they are witnesses to violence, oppression, conflict – often committed by tyrannical regimes – natural disasters and grieving peoples. They also bring us photographs of graphic beauty and the grandeur of nature. In short, they inform, disturb and delight us. For the last six years, the World Press Photo Exhibition has been an important feature in the Scottish parliament, during the Festival of Politics in Edinburgh. It finished on Saturday.
Later that day, I met Ed Ou, the winner in the contemporary issues category for his set of photographs of Somali refugees risking life as they flee across the Gulf of Aden to Yemen. Many failed and were arrested. Ou is a worldwise 24-year-old who belongs around the world but hails from Vancouver – an “ambiguous” Canadian, he says.
Ou was born in 1987 and took up photography as a teenager, covering the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, as well as the fall of the Islamic courts in Somalia, while studying politics in the Middle East. He later worked for Reuters and the Associated Press, covering stories ranging from conflict in the Middle East to fashion in New York City.
After university, Ou moved to Kazakhstan and has more recently focused his lens on refugees fleeing Somalia. He was selected as one of Photo District News's 30 Under 30 in 2008 and his work has been recognised by Pictures of the Year International and Best of Photojournalism, among others. He was a participant in the 2010 World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass.
His pictures have a strong sense of theatre – his use of light, or lack of it, adds drama to already starkly threatening situations. His essay from the demonstrations in Cairo earlier in the year is a searing account of defiance from mainly young Egyptians. And yet, he has no formal training with the camera, having fallen into it from his studies in politics. He has never shot film and – like many of his contemporaries – is multi-medial with a firm command of new communication tools and social networking.
Earlier in the week, during the MediaGuardian International Television Festival being held elsewhere in Edinburgh, the admirable Sky News reporter Alex Crawford – whose despatches from Libya have been so riveting – stated that she found it impossible to remain dispassionate when covering conflict. “You can’t go through these experiences without being scarred,” she said, adding that people who claim they can be impartial are not being truthful.
I asked Ed Ou about this. Although he says he is not a war photographer and holds no opinion one way or the other when confronted by extremism, he explains that when an assignment is over he feels more emotional, in extremes, missing family and his world friends. He has no set paths for an assignment but feels it is difficult not to go all the way, and to excel in the task as quickly as possible.
“I have no life”, he says, and was looking weary but relaxed in Edinburgh. “I can drink the water and no one wants to beat me up or expel me. Everyone is friendly.”
I bumped into him the following day as he was checking out of his hotel, his big lumpy bag over his shoulder. Next stop Tripoli.
– Graeme Murdoch is an independent consultant and former newspaper and magazine art director. He can be contacted at graeme@culturalconnectscotland.co
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