As it happens, I featured this photo in “Separating Migrant Children from Parents. This Is America…Too!” June 20, 2018.
Its plainly heartrending nature compelled me to begin that commentary as follows:
On too many occasions in the course of human events, man’s inhumanity to man provokes commentaries that inflame passions more than shed light. This is one of those occasions. But I hope what follows sheds light more than inflames passions.
Given that, this comes as no surprise:
A viral image of a crying Honduran child at the U.S.-Mexico border has won the 2019 World Press Photo contest’s Photo of the Year prize.
The Amsterdam-based World Press Photo Foundation announced the winners of the annual awards on Thursday, honoring the best photojournalism of the prior year.
(Huffington Post, April 12, 2019)
Except that no viral images have shown more heartrending depictions of human migration than those of Africans crossing the Mediterranean Sea. Not least because, instead of children crying, those images often showed them dying.
What’s more, I have been bemoaning such images for years. I refer you to such commentaries as “Lampedusa Tragedy Highlights Europe’s ‘Haitian’ Problem,” October 7, 2013, and “Europeans Erecting Fences to Maintain Good Relations with African Neighbors,” October 8, 2005.
Which raises the question: Why did this image of a crying Honduran girl at the US-Mexico border win the Photo of the Year prize, but no image of any dying African child in the Mediterranean Sea ever did?
Related commentaries:
separating migrant children…
Lampedusa tragedy…
Europeans erecting fences..