Madrid, (EFE) tenderness”, said the president of the EFE Agency, Gabriela Cañas.
The exhibition is part of the 40th anniversary of the 2023 International Journalism Awards, which are delivered this Thursday, and is made up of the 41 photographs that have obtained it since its birth in 1983. It can be seen until July 13, in a free, in the gardens of Campo del Moro.
Under the bold, sensitive and critical lens of photographers such as Sebastião Salgado, Gervasio Sánchez, Pedro Armestre or Manuel Salvador Saldarriaga, the exhibition proposes a journey from 1983 through the events that have marked current events in all this time.
The rescue of a child after the eruption of the Nevado del Ruiz volcano in Colombia, the journey of migrants through the Darién jungle (Panama) to the United States or the arrest of Diego Armando Maradona in an anti-drug raid in Argentina, are some of the snapshots who collects the sample.
It also includes denunciation photographs such as that of a woman holding the body of her son shot to death in her arms (Brazil) or that of the Diana Adriel brothers doing their homework sitting on the edge of the bed under a beam of light (Brazil). .
“The Pulitzers of Latin America”
Throughout its 40 editions, these international awards, granted by the EFE Agency and the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID), have contributed to “widening the borders of Ibero-America”, according to Cañas, for whom these awards could called “the Pulitzers of Ibero-America”.
Also for the photojournalist Gervasio Sánchez, awarded in 2008 for the series “Vidas Minadas, 10 years on the drama suffered by the victims of the mines”, “winning a King of Spain Award is very complicated, you have to have it as if it were the Pulizter Spanish”.
“It is important to support photography, it shows how close you are almost always to what is happening and it can cost the life of the person who takes it,” he remarked.
Since he began working in 1984 covering the most violent conflicts in El Salvador, Guatemala or Nicaragua, he realized “the great quality of Latin American journalism: journalists, photographers, cameras who risked their lives,” he remarked.
“The number of journalists killed is impressive, people who have risked their lives to do journalism responsibly,” Sánchez emphasized.
Ana de la Cueva, president of Patrimonio Nacional, has expressed her satisfaction at being able to collaborate with EFE on this project and has stressed that “a good image transmits knowledge, emotion and confronts us with our own truth.”
“Knowledge will help overcome difficulties”
De la Cueva highlighted two images from the exhibition: José S. Abanto Cerdán (Peru) and Márcia Foletto (Brazil), in which children from outside their environment concentrate on their studies with the faith that knowledge will help them overcome the difficulties.
The president of National Heritage has also announced that in the Royal Collections Gallery there will be a “prominent” space for documentary photography “because it forms an important part of our heritage.”
The ambassador of the Dominican Republic, Juan Bolívar Díaz Santana; the Minister of Culture of the Embassy of Israel, Sapir Efron, and Hajer Al Sulaiti, from the second headquarters of the Embassy of Qatar.
Also present were the Director General for Latin America and the Caribbean of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation, Enrique Yturriaga Saldanha; the managing director of Casa de América, Oscar Dávila Penen; the Director of Programming, Luis Prados; and his Communication coordinator, Javier Fernaud Quintana.