‘Extreme Pain, but Also Extreme Joy’ – Maggie Shannon wins at the Global Peace Photo Award 2021 for the Peace Image of the Year
On the evening of the UN International Day of Peace, 21 September 2021, winners of the international photography competition, Global Peace Photo Award, were awarded for the ninth time at the Austrian Parliament in Vienna. Recipients of Alfred-Fried Peace medals for their work are : Nate Hofer for ‘One and a Half Acres’, Shabana Zahir for ‘Our Journey’, Derrick Ofusu Boateng for ‘Peace and Strength’, Snezhana von Büdingen for ‘Meeting Sofie’, and Maggie Shannon for ‘Extreme Pain, but Also Extreme Joy ’.
Winner of the Global Peace Photo Award main prize Peace Image of the Year 2021, worth € 10000, is Maggie Shannon for her reportage about home births during the first lockdown in Los Angeles in spring 2020. The hospitals are flooded with Covid patients. In the maternity wards, spouses are not allowed. Many women want to give birth at home. Without mask, with the fathers. They are afraid of the hospitals. They are in panic. The midwifes receive emergency calls. In this situation, Margaret Shannon decides to accompany four of these midwives. She is impressed with the calm and decisiveness of these women. With their experience. And she is elated by those moments when all the pain has been overcome and the private happiness simply drowns out all the knowledge of the global pandemic.
Winner of the The Children’s Peace Image of the Year 2021 in the Children and Youth category, worth € 1000, is seven-year-old Aadhyaa Aravind Shankar from India. Her photo ‘Lap of Peace’ shows Aadhyaa’s mother resting in the lap of her reading mother. Both women are framed by plants that provide freshness. From outside, a cooling breeze comes in. Whether still a child or long grown up, Aadhyaa is convinced : Everyone finds peace in such moments. Finds safety and relaxation. Besides the Peace Image of the Year award received by Maggie Shannon, further recipients of the Alfred-Fried Peace Medals in 2021 are :
American photographer Nate Hofer for his work ‘One and a Half Acres’. Through the eye of his camera drone, he shows us his version of “swords to ploughshares”. A transition from military to civil : They look peaceful, these rectangular pieces of landscape in the American Midwest. Farming land, parking space for scrapped cars, area of wild growth, a church square, a forest, or a harvesting yard. But beneath them used to be hidden what could once have brought the death of millions : 450 launching platforms for intercontinental ballistic missiles, aimed at the Soviet Union. The end for these platforms of destruction came when US president George W. Bush and Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev managed to agree in 1991 on the START treaty : an agreement to at least reduce their nuclear weapons arsenal. Once the missile launch facilities had been dismantled, the land was sold back to the farmers.
Afghan photographer Shabana Zahir for her images created in her refugee camp in Greece entitled ‘Our journey’. In a very direct way, a young woman, so far completely unknown in the photography community, has translated her thoughts and feelings into pictures. In Farsi, her surname means “belonging to the night”. It was at night that her flight began. It lasted for months. Across borders, barbed wire, mountains. Afghanistan, Iraq, Turkey. In Turkey, Shabana worked as a waitress in a small restaurant and learned the language. Then she came to Greece on a boat. In the hope of getting to Western Europe, to Germany, along the route through the Balkans. A hope so far dashed. The refugee camp of Diavata near Thessaloniki. Two years of agony. Feeling wordless and useless. Until the small NGO Una mano per un Sorriso, a hand for a smile, introduced Shabana to photography. To a new way of expressing herself. To speaking in pictures.
Derrick Ofusu Boateng from Ghana for his work ‘Peace and Strength’. He is someone who loves Africa and its cultures. Who does not agree with our solidified image of Africa from news and films. He is someone who wants to emphatically celebrate the strength of the Africans. Their poetry. So he set out with his mobile camera, quite simply, as he says. Of course, he composes his pictures. Uses color generously. Wants beauty. Wants a personal victory over the everyday struggle. He celebrates play. He photographs and paints at the same time.
Russian-born, German-resident photographer Snezhana von Büdingen for her work ‘Meeting Sofie’ : Snezhana von Büdingen got to know her in autumn 2017, at the home of the girl, then 18-years-old, a farmstead dating back to the 16th century in the village of Eilenstedt in the German state of Sachsen-Anhalt. A fairy-tale garden, a house full of antiques and old paintings. It is like out of a different era, says the photographer, dreamy, harmonic, full of peace. And in it this special young woman. Self-confident, at peace with herself, who likes pretty clothes, is in love with a young man, secure in her family. In transition from child to adult, with all that entails in searching and trying things out and small dramas. Snezhana von Büdingen at first documented the intimate love between mothers and their children with Down syndrome in a series of portraits taken in a studio in Cologne. But the vitality and diversity of her intimate long-term project with Sophie makes her hope to take down the “imaginary boundaries” between us and the lives others. We humans, she says, “definitely need more acceptance, more integration, more love.”
The Global Peace Photo Award 2021 received a total of 16,396 images from 114 countries, most of which from India followed by Russia, USA, Germany, and Iran.
Submitted photos were judged by a top-notch jury. The reasons given by the jury members from eight nations behind the total of six awards were formulated by long-time GEO Editor-in-Chief Peter-Matthias Gaede from Hamburg. GoSee : friedaward.com/jury
The prize was inspired by Austrian pacifist and author Alfred Hermann Fried (* 11 November 1864, Vienna; † 4 May 1921, Vienna). Fried received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1911, together with Tobias Asser, organizer of the first International The Hague Peace Conference.
The Awards Ceremony – In his welcoming speech, Peter Raggl, President of the Austrian Federal Council, emphasized the extraordinary cooperation with the Global Peace Photo Award and how important it is to give peace a forum in these times.
The host throughout the evening was Lois Lammerhuber, who initiated the Global Peace Photo Award together with his wife Silvia Lammerhuber and has organized it from the very beginning. He reminded us once again that “peace is not the absence of war, but something I would like to call a successful life. Every year, the submitted photos and stories touch us anew with their creativity and passion for what is good and peaceful in this world.”
Following a moment of silence to commemorate the journalists killed in 2021, Galina Timchenko, founder and director of the Latvian online platform ‘Meduza’, gave a blazing speech for freedom of expression : “This campaign against freedom of speech, against truth and European values is not just about Russia, it’s a direct threat to all Europe. And the only defense we, civil society, could build, the only shield we have, is made from paper or monitors with text or photos on it. Free, objective, trusted information gives us hope to protect all we believe in.”
Afterwards, the Children’s Peace Image of the Year 2021 award was presented to 7-year-old Aadhyaa Aravind Shankar from India for her photo ‘Lap of Peace’. The award was given to her by Mag. Gerhard Lahner, Board Member and Chief Operations Officer (COO) of the Vienna Insurance Group (VIG), which supports this award : “The philosophy of Vienna Insurance Group to think in and for generations and thus take responsibility has always been at the heart of the business conducted by our insurance group. Which is why taking social and cultural responsibility in the long term is of particular importance to us.”
Claudia Dannhauser, Head of the Austrian Parliamentary Reporting Association, ORF Zeit im Bild, reflected in her speech on the importance of peace and that the Global Peace Photo Award makes a wonderful contribution to it : “Peace is a word that triggers different associations and emotions in each of us. To find the one image that symbolizes peace? It is not an easy task. The Global Peace Photo Award has been doing it for years. It is an invaluable contribution to sharpen the view, to raise the importance of peace for all of us – in times when war is commonplace, those affected do not always get quick help, and cynicism often wins out over idealism.”
The five prize winners, who were later awarded the Alfred Fried Peace Medal, expressed in their reportages and images this year best what peace can look like.
This year’s chairman of the 25-member jury, Eric Falt, Director UNESCO New Delhi, India, emphasized in his closing keynote speech, on the one hand, the high quality of the submitted photos, and on the other, the importance of gender equality : “There were so many extraordinary images expressing Peace in our 2021 photo contest. For the Image of the Year, our jury eventually selected the moving photographs of Maggie Shannon, who chronicled the work of midwives in Los Angeles during the COVID-19 crisis, unsung heroes of the pandemic assisting women to bring newborns into our crazy but beautiful world. In fact, three of our winners this year were female photographers showcasing women, which reminded us that there will be no true peace anywhere until and unless we achieve equality for women and men everywhere.”
The evening culminated in the announcement of the winning photograph. The award was presented by sponsor Silvia Lammerhuber, Peter Raggl, the President of the Austrian Federal Council, and this year’s jury Chairman Eric Fault. Lucky winner Maggie Shannon spoke last and found touching words for her awarded photographic work in her acceptance speech. GoSee : friedaward.com
CREDITS
Photographer Maggie Shannon
EDITION LAMMERHUBER Maggie Shannon beim Global Peace Photo Award 2021 für das „Friedensbild des Jahres“ ausgezeichnet.
EDITION LAMMERHUBER Maggie Shannon beim Global Peace Photo Award 2021 für das „Friedensbild des Jahres“ ausgezeichnet.
EDITION LAMMERHUBER Aadhyaa Aravind Shankar beim Global Peace Photo Award 2021 für das „Kinder-Friedensbild des Jahres“ ausgezeichnet.
EDITION LAMMERHUBER Maggie Shannon beim Global Peace Photo Award 2021 für das „Friedensbild des Jahres“ ausgezeichnet.
EDITION LAMMERHUBER Maggie Shannon beim Global Peace Photo Award 2021 für das „Friedensbild des Jahres“ ausgezeichnet.
EDITION LAMMERHUBER Maggie Shannon beim Global Peace Photo Award 2021 für das „Friedensbild des Jahres“ ausgezeichnet.
EDITION LAMMERHUBER Maggie Shannon beim Global Peace Photo Award 2021 für das „Friedensbild des Jahres“ ausgezeichnet.
EDITION LAMMERHUBER Maggie Shannon beim Global Peace Photo Award 2021 für das „Friedensbild des Jahres“ ausgezeichnet.
EDITION LAMMERHUBER Maggie Shannon beim Global Peace Photo Award 2021 für das „Friedensbild des Jahres“ ausgezeichnet.
EDITION LAMMERHUBER Maggie Shannon beim Global Peace Photo Award 2021 für das „Friedensbild des Jahres“ ausgezeichnet.
EDITION LAMMERHUBER Maggie Shannon beim Global Peace Photo Award 2021 für das „Friedensbild des Jahres“ ausgezeichnet.
EDITION LAMMERHUBER Maggie Shannon beim Global Peace Photo Award 2021 für das „Friedensbild des Jahres“ ausgezeichnet.
EDITION LAMMERHUBER Maggie Shannon beim Global Peace Photo Award 2021 für das „Friedensbild des Jahres“ ausgezeichnet.
EDITION LAMMERHUBER Maggie Shannon beim Global Peace Photo Award 2021 für das „Friedensbild des Jahres“ ausgezeichnet.
EDITION LAMMERHUBER Maggie Shannon beim Global Peace Photo Award 2021 für das „Friedensbild des Jahres“ ausgezeichnet.
EDITION LAMMERHUBER Maggie Shannon beim Global Peace Photo Award 2021 für das „Friedensbild des Jahres“ ausgezeichnet.
EDITION LAMMERHUBER Maggie Shannon beim Global Peace Photo Award 2021 für das „Friedensbild des Jahres“ ausgezeichnet.
EDITION LAMMERHUBER Maggie Shannon beim Global Peace Photo Award 2021 für das „Friedensbild des Jahres“ ausgezeichnet.
EDITION LAMMERHUBER Maggie Shannon beim Global Peace Photo Award 2021 für das „Friedensbild des Jahres“ ausgezeichnet.
EDITION LAMMERHUBER Maggie Shannon beim Global Peace Photo Award 2021 für das „Friedensbild des Jahres“ ausgezeichnet.
EDITION LAMMERHUBER Maggie Shannon beim Global Peace Photo Award 2021 für das „Friedensbild des Jahres“ ausgezeichnet.
EDITION LAMMERHUBER Maggie Shannon beim Global Peace Photo Award 2021 für das „Friedensbild des Jahres“ ausgezeichnet.
EDITION LAMMERHUBER Maggie Shannon beim Global Peace Photo Award 2021 für das „Friedensbild des Jahres“ ausgezeichnet.
EDITION LAMMERHUBER Maggie Shannon beim Global Peace Photo Award 2021 für das „Friedensbild des Jahres“ ausgezeichnet.
EDITION LAMMERHUBER Maggie Shannon beim Global Peace Photo Award 2021 für das „Friedensbild des Jahres“ ausgezeichnet.
EDITION LAMMERHUBER Maggie Shannon beim Global Peace Photo Award 2021 für das „Friedensbild des Jahres“ ausgezeichnet.
EDITION LAMMERHUBER Maggie Shannon beim Global Peace Photo Award 2021 für das „Friedensbild des Jahres“ ausgezeichnet.
EDITION LAMMERHUBER Maggie Shannon beim Global Peace Photo Award 2021 für das „Friedensbild des Jahres“ ausgezeichnet.
EDITION LAMMERHUBER Maggie Shannon beim Global Peace Photo Award 2021 für das „Friedensbild des Jahres“ ausgezeichnet.
EDITION LAMMERHUBER Maggie Shannon beim Global Peace Photo Award 2021 für das „Friedensbild des Jahres“ ausgezeichnet.
EDITION LAMMERHUBER Maggie Shannon beim Global Peace Photo Award 2021 für das „Friedensbild des Jahres“ ausgezeichnet.
EDITION LAMMERHUBER Maggie Shannon beim Global Peace Photo Award 2021 für das „Friedensbild des Jahres“ ausgezeichnet.
EDITION LAMMERHUBER Maggie Shannon beim Global Peace Photo Award 2021 für das „Friedensbild des Jahres“ ausgezeichnet.
EDITION LAMMERHUBER Maggie Shannon beim Global Peace Photo Award 2021 für das „Friedensbild des Jahres“ ausgezeichnet.
EDITION LAMMERHUBER Maggie Shannon beim Global Peace Photo Award 2021 für das „Friedensbild des Jahres“ ausgezeichnet.
EDITION LAMMERHUBER Maggie Shannon beim Global Peace Photo Award 2021 für das „Friedensbild des Jahres“ ausgezeichnet.
EDITION LAMMERHUBER Maggie Shannon beim Global Peace Photo Award 2021 für das „Friedensbild des Jahres“ ausgezeichnet.
EDITION LAMMERHUBER Maggie Shannon beim Global Peace Photo Award 2021 für das „Friedensbild des Jahres“ ausgezeichnet.
About EDITION LAMMERHUBER
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Dear fans of beautiful and sophisticated books,
“An extraordinary publisher, dedicated to little known themes, who presents them with courage and high quality, without descending into stereotypes.” This is how the jury of the FEP European Book Prize of the Year Awards argued their choice of Edition Lammerhuber for Best Publisher 2017, an accolade also awarded to the publisher from Baden bei Wien in the preceding competitions in 2013 and 2015 of this biennial event.
Present on the book market for more than seven years, with a steadily growing programme, we have worked our way to the top – internationally. Your are best at what you love doing. And we love books, we love photography. The photobook is the ideal medium to combine these loves. Photography documents the world in a very particular way and shapes human memory like no other medium does. Our ambition is twofold: We want to publish books with fascinating themes from art and science, with excellent photography, sophisticated texts and brilliant authors, but, most of all, we want to make books that have something to say, books that transport important themes into the heart of society. For us, a book charged with emotional photography is a point of reference for communication that reverberates far beyond the number of sold copies. We believe that we can make a real impact with a book. For us, a book is not just a commodity but an incomparable cultural technique.
Edition Lammerhuber wants to be the publisher for writer-photographers, for whom seeing is a vocation and whose ways of seeing the world is a process of insights. A process they are capable of transforming into the immediacy of a photograph, a creative act, initiated and completed within seconds or split seconds. As in the motto of Hungarian photographic artist László Moholy-Nagy, who declared, “Photography is there to make the visible visible.” Edition Lammerhuber strives to be home to the best ‘cyclops’ of our time, legends and new talents alike.
And how does an Edition Lammerhuber book come about? The theme must be important to us, the photography captivate us, there must be something special, magical, in the pictures. Once a decision has been made to publish, the photographer visits us at our publishing house. We go through the photographic material, determine the format of the book, think about a setting to suit the theme. This is when the almost magical process of designing and layouting starts. It usually takes about a week for the concept to be completed to the point where the work of everyone involved can be browsed on-screen, then it passes on to the next steps in the production.
Our declared aim is to approach a perfect book through a passionate creative process. Craft aspects are an essential part of it and of our publishing philosophy. All production steps up to the printing are done in our house. Our own experts produce the prepress. We really care about the reproduction quality of the photographs, the feel of the printed papers and the quality of the binding. We check every single printing form.
So it is hardly surprising that some reviewers call the books of Edition Lammerhuber pieces of art emanating from a ‘book chamber of marvels’ and that nearly all titles gather awards, including those of the Art Directors Club New York, the Deutsche Fotobuchpreis, the Pictures of the Year International (POYI) Awards, USA, the Visa d’or, France, the FEP European Book Prize of the Year Awards or the World Press Photo. Today our books are available in more than 170 countries, usually published in two, sometimes three, languages.
Exceptional photography is not only found in the books of Edition Lammerhuber but also in a photo competition jointly initiated in Vienna in 2013 by Edition Lammerhuber and the Photographische Gesellschaft. Under the general heading What Does Peace Look Like? , the Alfred Fried Photography Award, worth 10 000 euros, chooses the peace image of the year. Participation in the award has exploded in recent years, confirming the status of photography as a medium for transporting essential socio-political themes. From 2017, a separate competition for the peace image of the year is open to children up to the age of 14.
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