The annual rendez-vous of the WorldPress Photo is currently taking place in the Nieuwe Kerk of Amsterdam. Beyond the usual reporting on the sufferings of the world, I focused this year on some of the stories told by artists involved in long-term projects throughout all the continents. Lalo de Almeida, a photographer based in São Paulo, Brazil, tells us about the Amazonian dystopia, portraying the social, political and environmental realities of Brazil under the presidency of Bolsonaro. A gruesome view of the Amazonia, today, the lungs of the world. Charinthorn Rachurutchata, a photography-based visual artist based in Bangkok, Thailand, juxtaposes archival images of the 6 October 1976 massacre of students at Bangkok’s Thammasat University with photographs she took during the 2020-2022 Thai pro-democracy protests, in order to understand the root causes of the present-day protests, using the Japanese technique of kintsugi by tearing photographs, then mending them with lacquer and powdered gold: an elegant way to share her will to remember, the title of her work. Matthew Abbott, an Australian who once lived in West Arnhem Land and was accepted into a local community, follows the Indigenous Australians who have strategically burned land to protect their environment for tens of thousands of years.Guillaume Herbaut, member of Agence VU’ since 2021, is a French photographer based in Paris, France. He followed the events in Ukraine In November 2013, when tens of thousands of people took to the streets of Kyiv in the Ukraine to protest against the decision of pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych to pull out of signing an association agreement with the European Union. An Ukraine crisis calling another one. There were many more stories told, but these were, for me, representative of a new generation of artists driven by a strong desire to tell a story.
