The hug of a nurse in a pandemic, the winning image of World Press Photo

The photograph taken by Danish Mads Nissen of the pandemic’s “First Embrace” (The First Embrace), which shows a woman kissed by a nurse in Brazil in August, was selected on Thursday as the photograph of the year by the World Press Photo jury.

The image captures one of the most special moments of the pandemic, in which Rosa Luzia Lunardi, 85, receives a nurse hug Adriana Silva da Costa Souza, at the Viva Bem residence in São Paulo, Brazil on August 5, 2020.

The moment, captured by the Danish photographer, is a “Iconic image of covid-19” and “commemorates the most extraordinary moment of our lives, everywhere,” according to juror and photographer Kevin WY Lee, who saw in the photo “vulnerability, loved ones, loss and separation, disappearance but, most importantly, survival, the all in one graphic image ”.

The Story of the Year category went to “Habibi”, by Italian documentary photographer Antonio Faccilongo, who told from a human perspective a love story set in one of the longest and most complicated conflicts in the story, the Israeli-Palestinian war.

This work has been defined as “a masterpiece” and “a story of human struggle in the twenty-first century”, in the words of Ahmed Najm, member of the jury, who considered that “it shows another side of the long conflict. contemporary between Israel and Palestine “.

The digital storytelling story “Rebuilding Seven Days of Protests in Minneapolis After the Death of George Floyd” (Holly Bailey, Matt Daniels and Amelia Wattenberger) was the winner of the Interactive World Press Photo of the Year.

This book offers a “complete picture of the first week of protests” in Minneapolis (USA) after the African American Floyd murder in the hands of a policeman and is a play that “makes unprecedented use of user-generated content and combines and maps 147 live videos”.

In addition, the jury selected as the online video of the year “Call from Wuhan”, by Yang Shenlai and Tang Xiaolan, who tell through a series of recorded telephone conversations the story of a family in the first epicenter of covid-19.

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