PAN AFRICAN VISUAL JOURNALISM & ITS POSITIONS
Presented by the Market Photo Workshop, World Press Photo & The Windybrow Arts Centre
Pan African Visual Journalism and Its Positions is an exhibition and public programming initiative that stages the work of the 2020 World Press Photo Contest winners with a focus on content produced in Africa. The initiative is a partnership of the World Press Photo Foundation and the Market Photo Workshop.
The World Press Photo Foundation and the Market Photo Workshop support the conditions that make visual journalism and storytelling possible, including the freedom of expression, freedom of inquiry, and freedom of the press. The need for images and stories we can trust has never been greater, and the high-quality reports in this exhibition bring you important insights about our world. Sometimes that is done with beautiful photographs and sometimes that requires presenting difficult stories, but they are all accurate and they all matter.
The politics of Africa and visual journalism industries is as long and fraught with contradictions as the practice. African photojournalists need greater visibility and access to resources and protections. How news media represents continental cultures and predicaments remains a concern. The practice of journalism and its freedoms have been affected by technological as well as geo-political shifts in the industry and democracies around the world.
Where to from here? Pan-African Visual Journalism and Its Positions is a Pan-African focused photography event that will bring award-winning visual journalists and emerging photographers in the industry into a critical conversation about the future of visual storytelling within journalism in Africa.
Opening on 21 November, the World Press Photo Exhibition 2020 will be held at Market Photo Workshop, in Johannesburg South Africa until 13 December. The outdoor exhibition, to be installed at historic Mary Fitzgerald Square in Newtown, presents award-winning photography from the 63rd annual World Press Photo Contest, with a special focus on stories from African photographers and narratives related to the continent.
This year 4,282 photographers from 125 countries entered 73,996 photographs to the contest. These visual stories were judged in terms of their accurate, fair, and compelling insights about our world. All entrants accept the code of ethics, and all winning pictures went through a rigorous verification process, ensuring they can be trusted to show the scene witnessed by the photographer. The contest was judged by an independent jury comprising leading photography professionals, and its membership of the jury changes every year. The 2020 Photo Contest Jury was capably chaired by Head of the Market Photo Workshop, Lekgetho Makola.
The exhibition will be accompanied by public programming, both in-person and virtual, that includes a series of workshops and panel discussions presented by Market Photo Workshop and selected institutions from the Centres for Learning Photography in Africa (CLPA) Network, namely Nlele Institute of Lagos, Uganda Press Photo of Kampala, The Other Vision of Khartoum, Kigali Centre for Photography in Rwanda and the Market Photo Workshop. These public programming activities will be hosted online by the photoformafrica.com virtual platform and through social media spaces, and will be driven in partnership with World Press Photo.
