At the “Vilnius Photography Circle” festival, a photojournalist from Ukraine was awarded the “Stasios Lozoraitis Freedom of Hope” prize | Culture

Yevhenijas Maloletka’s photographs are also exhibited at the Vilnius train station, in an exhibition dedicated to passengers of the aggressor country going to and from the Kaliningrad region. The author, together with other guests of the international photojournalism festival, visited this exhibition during their stay in Vilnius. It reveals the brutality of the war, which is being experienced by Ukraine, which is being destroyed by the aggressor, through photographs taken by Ukrainian photographers.

This theme ran throughout the festival. Among the nine finalist series of the festival, even three are from Ukraine. This is the story “Ukraine is bleeding” by Danish photographer, multiple winner of the World Press Photo contest, Mads Nissen, and “Ukraine: Gray Zone” by Lithuanian Ben Gerdziūnas. On Saturday, during the “Photographers’ Meetings” festival, presenting the award-winning series “Mariupolis”, Jevhen Maloletka talked about his experiences and work as a photojournalist, when he slept with patients on the floor in the hospital, about the aggressor’s propaganda and people’s reactions when the radio broadcast only one message, that withdrawal is possible only to the country of the aggressor, when the ambulance transported the wounded without stopping, but this happened until there was a mobile connection, because when it disappeared, only relatives and friends or neighbors brought the wounded to the hospital. Jevhen singled out one case: “Parents brought an injured little child, medics tried to revive him for half an hour, but he did not survive. Parents cried, doctors acted, we cried too.”

Perhaps the most famous photos of Yevhen and his colleague Mstyslav Chernov’s video images, which were widely used by the Western media, from the evacuation of the maternity hospital in Mariupol. The way the aggressor tried to deny the reality of this evacuation was also discussed in the additional meeting with Jevhen organized by the Festival’s partners, which took place at the “World Press Photo” exhibition in Vilnius, in the “Kilo Health” space. With this and other reports, J. Maloletka and his colleague M. Chernov, being one of the few journalists and, according to AP, the only international journalists in Mariupol, refuted the claims of the Russian Foreign and Defense Ministries that Russia targets only military targets.

Other visiting colleagues also presented their series during the “Photographers’ Weekend” organized by the festival. Italian photographer Fausto Podavini presented a series about the worst natural disaster in terms of casualties that occurred in the Minas Gerais region of Brazil. There, a dam owned by the Brazilian multinational company Vale, the most important iron ore mining company in the area, collapsed, spilling tons of water and heavily contaminated mud into the valley below. The remains of the mine hit the outskirts of Corrego do Fežuão and Brumadinho, killing 215 people and leaving another 92 missing. German photographer Toby Binder, presenting his series “Little Bastards – Belfast Youth”, told how he has been visiting teenagers born in the working-class areas of Belfast after 1998 for many years. Good Friday agreement and records their life, maturation, and the changes taking place there.

“Photographers’ weekend” was opened by Tadas Kazakevičius, presenting his series “Last year’s snow”, which tells about the deportations to distant Siberia by Lithuanian occupiers after the Second World War. Introducing this series, Tadas says: “Probably every family in Lithuania is marked in one way or another on this tragic page of history. For some, this story is just a sad memory, but often it is a bloody wound that heals hard and takes a long time. Even now, this topic offends each of us in its own way. There is no easy way to talk about it. It’s like untouchable.” Benas Gerdžiūnas continued the day of meetings that began with this series, which has direct parallels with how the people of Ukraine are being “transferred” to the aggressor’s country this year, who presented in detail the topic of Ukraine, which he examines in his series, and the experiences of a photojournalist in going to the so-called “gray” front lines for many years. zones.

During the “Frontiers of Photojournalism” conference, Søren Pagteris, who has been in charge of the photojournalism program at the world-renowned Danish School of Media and Journalism (DMJX) for 25 years, presented the changes at their school, where photojournalists are trained not as photographers for newspapers or news portals, but as photographers of a wide variety of visual journalism topics, revealed in photo series or video format, creators. They talked about how the school’s approach to the learning process itself was intended and how the situation in the media is changing today, what the creator of a visual story must be prepared for. A guest from the USA, Bruce Strong, an award-winning photographer, videographer and professor at Syracuse University’s SINewhouse School of Public Communication in New York, presented a particularly important part of photojournalism – how people perceive images and photo stories, how to create them and keep people’s attention, when today you have to compete with the mostly subjective , and sometimes the more attractive, visual information of social networks.

The series of events of the festival was summed up by the “Ceremony of Photographic Films and Awards”. Along with the “Stasios Lozoraitis Vilties Laisvės” prize, which was awarded to Jevheniis Maloletka, the winners of the festival competitions were announced. The winner of the festival’s main competition “Circle of Life” was photographer Mikkel Hørlyck from Denmark, who was awarded a camera from main sponsor Fujifilm for the series “Mysterious Jørgen” about one man’s life’s struggle against the world and himself. Introducing this five-year series, Mikkel says: “As a photographer, I wouldn’t hesitate for a second to say that I had the honor of photographing a legend. Jørgen? He cheated death. Many times. But he didn’t do it alone. He was helped by doctors, nurses and caregivers for many years. They saved him – again and again.” under the theme “Women who hold half the sky”, the winner was Iranian photographer Shayan Haji Najaf. The author was awarded a Fujifilm camera for the photographic story “Two Butterfly Wings”, which reveals Zahra’s battle with bone cancer and her bright dream to one day fly with two butterfly wings.

Starting from Thursday, Vilnius residents and guests of the city will be able to see all the above-mentioned series in outdoor exhibitions, which will be installed next to the Gediminas monument. The guests of the festival, commemorating the quality of visual expression that is particularly important today and the meaning created, were happy that Lithuanian photographers are organizing such an international festival, financed by the Lithuanian Culture Council, Vilnius City Municipality and the Baltic-American Freedom Fund (BAFF) and other sponsors and partners, which allows them to gain knowledge and improve without leaving your country, while also involving photography students from Vilnius and Kaunas in the educational activities of the festival.

In the magazine “Fotografijos ratas” published by the festival, domestic and foreign readers, the magazine is published in Lithuanian and English, can familiarize themselves in detail with all the photo series of the finalists and winners of the festival competitions and the guests of the festival.