Catalan photographer Samuel Aranda wins the World Press Photo of the Year

Barcelona (ACN).- The international jury of the 55^thedition of the annual competition World Press Photo has selected a photograph by Catalan Samuel Aranda as the picture of the year. The winning photograph portrays a fully-veiled woman in Yemen holding a wounded relative in her arms inside a mosque, which was used as a field hospital by the protesters against Ali Abdullah Saleh’s regime. The picture was taken during the violent repression of the protests organised in the capital of Yemen, Sanaa, on October 15^th 2011. The Catalan photographer, born in Santa Coloma de Gramenet (Barcelona) in 1979, was working in Yemen for the ‘New York Times’, and is currently represented by Corbis Images.

The organisation’s press release states that a member of the World Press Photo jury Koyo Kouou believes that the awarded picture “speaks for the entire region. It stands for Yemen, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria, for everything that happened in the Arab Spring. But it shows a private, intimate side of what went on. And it shows the role that women played, not only as carers, but as active people in the movement”, he said.

Another jury member, Nina Berman, said that “Western media seldom show veiled women in intimate moments. It is as if all of the events of the Arab Spring resulted in this single moment - in moments like this.”

Aranda started his photojournalistic career aged 19 years old

Samuel Aranda started to collaborate as a photojournalist for ‘EL País’ and ‘El Periódico de Catalunya' aged just 19 years old. When he was 21, he travelled to the Middle East to cover the conflict between Israel and Palestine for the Spanish EFE news agency. In 2004 he started to work for AFP and to cover several conflicts, such as those in Pakistan, Gaza, Lebanon, and Iraq, among others. He has also covered several social issues throughout Spain.

In 2006, Aranda won several awards for a series of pictures on a group of migrants who were trying to reach Europe. In 2011 he started to work on the Arab countries’ protests. Some of his pictures have been published in the most prestigious international newspapers and magazines, such as ‘The New York Times’, ‘Le Monde’, ‘Newsweek’, ‘Stern’, and ‘Geo’. Currently he works freelance, mainly for ‘The New York Times’ and Barcelona-based ‘La Vanguardia’ and its weekly publication ‘El Magazine’. He lives between Barcelona and Tunisia. He is represented by the photo agency Corbis Images.