Sir Winston Churchill had nothing to offer to the British people but “blood, toil, tears and sweat” in a famous speech in 1940. Thats’s about what you get at each new edition of the WorldPress Photo festival in Amsterdam. It seems mankind is destined to suffer, to bleed, to cry and to sweat, over and over again. This suffering is also what gives the best pictures. The 2021 edition is no different, spanning from the absurd short war for Nagorno-Karabakh, to the massive ammonium nitrate explosion in Beirut, to the demonstrations for freedom in Peru, to nature playing its own part in The Philippines. And if people live in peace, they just accumulate absurd numbers of firearms for an hypothetical protection against bad guys. There will be enough suffering to renew this yearly event for many years to come. We cannot complain as the best photojournalists will be there to give us touching, moving pictures of the human suffering.
