Good morning. Welcome to the World Press Photo 2015 Contest Press Conference. This is a first
for me and it's an honor to sit up here with Michelle McNally, chair of the jury of this
year. It's been quite an experience. This is a fantastic organization with great people
and it has been a smooth competition to organize and we are very happy to be supported by many
of you in the field, our long-term sponsorship at Canon and the Dutch postcode lottery.
I think we should go start and look at some images. I can announce you we have the winner
with us here today and we'll present them after the slideshow photos that Michelle will
show to you and talk you through it. So, Michelle, good morning and give you the stage.
Thank you. On behalf of the jury, I welcome you all here. It's been a very exciting year,
obviously. Since we are so honored to have the World Press Photo winner here, I'm going
to go right to the images from various categories and show them to you.
So this first image is about clashes. It's a protest in Turkey. It's truly evocative
of all clashes around the world. It's beautifully executed and people will say that, okay, thank
you. People will say that it looks like a Mona Lisa because her eyes will follow you
wherever you go. This comes from the portrait category. It's a picture of an illegal sex
worker in China. It's from the portrait category. Just take a look at her feet and her hands
and how much that tells about this person and at the moment of humiliation. This is
an interesting story. It's a photograph taken by a drone. One of our other jurors would
say this is what photojournalism is and this is what photojournalism will be. We will be
shooting a lot of material with drones in the future. It's a beautiful composition.
It's amazing. This is just another way of telling a news story. It's taken in Ukraine.
It's extremely painterly, obviously, but look at the blood on the curtains, the destruction
on the table, but yet it was just meant to be a still life and yet you can feel the family
and all the humanity in that picture with no one in it. This comes from the nature category.
Look at that monkey. The cringing. It's unbelievable. It's unbearable. This comes from the nature
category, too. There it is. These are mind suckers. What they do is they're parasites
when what they do is that they take over the brains of the other animal that they're feeding
off of. It's crazy. It's taken in a Petri dish. It's amazing. This is the downing of
MH17. It is a scary picture of this tragedy. How many of us can relate to this trapped
in a passenger seat of an aircraft? It's beautifully done, not quite in your face, but totally
memorable. This comes from a daily life story. Oops, sorry, too fast. This comes from daily
life stories. It's actually a love story. Ultimately, the photographer had a concept,
white to white, because his grandparents, and in the end, his grandmother dies. Beautiful,
warm, intimate. I'm about to introduce the world press photo of the year.
Please, there's an embargo until 11. Please note that. I've been told several times. Don't
forget, everybody will be excited, but it's an embargo until 11 o'clock.
This picture is a picture of a gay couple living in Russia. They are John and Alex. This picture
is very intimate, incredibly beautiful. It illustrates an issue, a global issue that
affects millions of people and 10 dozens of countries. It is brilliantly executed. The
light is painterly, incredibly composed, very, very intimate. It's the only kind of picture
that you would think needs time, but it needs a special photographer.
We present you Metz Nissen. Please come to the stage. He's here. Join me here on stage.
This is an important moment, Metz. We talked on the phone yesterday when I called you.
We flew you in last night. Can you talk about this series and what's the importance to you
as a photographer?
Well, first of all, thanks to World Press Photo and to John and Alex. To me, this picture
is about love and hate, something as simple as love and hate. It's a picture about desire,
a desire so deep inside us that no matter how you raise your child, how much you beat
up people, which laws you make, this desire goes so deep inside some of us that you cannot
hide it away.
But there's also just a story about two young people, John and Alex. I see it as a modern
Romeo and Juliet story, two people who want to fall in love, but some people don't want
to let them love who they want to love. So it all started to me in June 2013. I was interested
in this topic of homophobia in Russia, but sometimes when you shoot, there's the moment
where it goes from being a story to become something very personal. And this moment,
to me, happened when I was with this young guy Pavel, I met him the day before. He was
a cute young guy, very soft, and someone comes up to him and screams in his face, are you
a faggot?
Pavel says, yes, I am homosexual. So this young guy, this hooligan punches him right
in the face. And I was just speechless. I didn't know if I should cry, or if I should
scream, or if I should get involved in the fight, because I was just so outraged. So
I began to photograph. That's what I do. And so this story I've been working on for quite
some time, and I keep coming back. And I've been photographing violence. I've been photographing
homophobic videos where they catch young gays and humiliate them and film it on and put
it on YouTube. But at one point, I realized that something was missing from my work. Just
the pure love, the pure desire, the pure lust to another person. So that was when I got the
chance to meet John and Alex, and I explained them why I needed to make this picture. And
luckily they invited me to their bedroom. So it was a night in St. Petersburg. This picture
was taken at 2 a.m. in the morning. And I looked at my raw files yesterday, and I realized
that I left the place at 4 a.m. So I'm sure it was a very special night for them and for
me as well.
Time for questions. Any?
Yeah. So in June 2013, Russia made this new law prohibiting what they call propaganda
for non-traditional sexual relationships to minors, right? So they made this new law.
So what I've been trying to do is just covering all kind of aspects of this, the violence,
the homophobic videos. I even met with some of the people who do these videos listening
to their story and their motivations. I've been in the courts to protest and doing portraits
of young parents who are risking to get fired from the job and so on. So this is one aspect
in a greater work. But even in a greater work, every single picture, every single person
matters. So these are not just, you know, symbols of a greater story. This is two individuals.
Yeah.
Anyone else?
And maybe I should tell that yesterday, when I got the message, I was completely overwhelmed
and at one of my, when I got to think a little bit more clear again, I reached out to them
and they're very happy about it. They're proud.
Any other questions? Yes, Eddie.
I think this is important to me that this picture is not staged. It's just as much
reputant as any other work that I do, which is what do you do now? So this is not staged.
This is a reputant picture.
But does this answer your question?
A lot more or less, of course, you can always discuss if something is staged or not. I
think it's a special picture. It's not the work that's usually news, but the world news,
the subject also. But again, we have a picture of something more or less a background picture.
I would just, I think it's the core of your question, I think it's a question to the jury.
Because what I would just say is that I would just continue and this is important to me
to stress that this would have, for me, it's not a difficult question whether it's staged
or not. To me, this would have happened if even if I was not there. And I said to them,
just do what you do, pretend that I'm not here. So that's how I define it.
And for World Press Photo, I think we should be well aware that this is something else.
And I think it's very interesting that this is happening. I think the jury is well aware
of that and they made their choice very clear. So we'll have to see. This is the 58th World
Press Photo competition and we'll see from the future on what it will bring us in the
next years.
I think the jury pretty wants to make it clear that there are many stories out there. And
there are various ways to tell a story. This is an issue, a big issue. And that's the statement
we would make. And it is a statement.
Yeah. So first of all, you pronounce my name Mass. I'm born in Denmark in Copenhagen. I'm
35 years old. And I have a wife and a son. And I work for Danish newspaper, Politiken.
This work was done while working for another newspaper called Berlinske. I changed my contract
this summer. I'm represented by Panas Pictures in the UK, live in Germany and Prospect in
Italy. And I see my work, I work on contemporary, I work on a lot of issues, right, on international
news and portraits. The core of my work I think is contemporary issues, complicated issues.
And I like to put myself in places where I think I can make a difference. Where there's
not a lot of other photographers around me. And if there is, then I can contribute with
something that they cannot see, right? So that's when I feel that my work has a purpose,
so it's a strong purpose. Yeah. You want to know more about me?
I really, you know, I think I'm from a generation of photographers who don't want to be put
in boxes. So I'm a storyteller. I like writing. I like researching. I mean, this is a personal
project for me. It started from me looking at Pavel being hit in the face. And that's
when I started to read all the reports about it. And I like to write my own stories. I
like to do multimedia. I like to do videos. I like to do six by six hustle blood. I like
to shoot on my iPhone. I'm a storyteller. That's what I am.
Yes. Sure. So I was in, I was in 2009, I was selected
as a jupe SWAT masterclass participant. At that time, I was, I just graduated and I,
in the Dana School of Journalism, I, and I looked around and everyone in this industry
was just crying about the hard times of being a documentary photographer. So I said to myself,
what is the most interesting place in my time right now? Where's this defining place where
you should be, you know, the, my generations 89, I would go to Moscow probably in 78, I
would go to San Francisco. So I decided to move to Shanghai to China, where I ended up
living for two years. So at that time, I was a young, just graduated, I was a young freelancer
in China. It was very, very, very interesting times before the 2008 Olympics and big discussion
by human rights. So at that time, I was also working on a long time project about the Amazon
rainforest, which is now a book. And this was the work I did for the jupe SWAT masterclass.
I've been traveling six, I came through the Amazon, I worked on it for seven years. And
for the jupe SWAT masterclass, I did a work on the biggest illegal gold mine in South
America in the middle of the rainforest. And it's, it's not just about how you dig up gold.
To me, it's about how we treat each other, how we treat nature, how we, the human kind
is lusting or desire or greed. So that's, that's what I like about stories when it's
the more layers and more complicated. I'd like to say that in this year in this competition,
we had several winners that had been participating in the jupe SWAT masterclass. And we're very
proud of that. It underlines the importance of this program, which has been running for
21 years. So just to give you a note of that. Questions? I think it's time to throw you
into the whole bunch of journalists. And thank you for being here. We're here available
for interviews. Everything is controlled by the staff of World Press Photo. So make sure
you'll connect to them. And I wish you all a very good day.
Let's have a photo. Yeah, there's another one.
