Ukraine’s 2020 Bird in Flight Photo Prize winner is announced

Ukrainian magazine Bird in Flight has announced Peruvian photographer Paola Jimenez Quispe as the winner of its 2020 photo prize.

Selected from more than 450 applications from 53 countries, Jimenez Quispe’s moving project tells the story of her father’s murder through archive photography, staged photos, and police images of the body and his belongings. “This is my way of facing grief,” she explained.

In addition to the main prize, the Readers’ Choice Award went to Turkish photographer Erdem Varol’s exploration of his neighbourhood in Istanbul, called Mom, Do You Still Think That I Am Vulgar?.

Now in its third year, the Bird in Flight photo prize celebrates innovative storytelling through photography.

“We invited curators, psychologists, and sociologists as part of the jury to help our audience look at images in a wider social context, go beyond photography, and maybe one day move away from the judgment on the ‘like’/’dislike’ level,” one of the curators, Anastasia Zhetvina, told The Calvert Journal.

Due to the pandemic, the exhibition showing the works of the 10 shortlisted photographers is available online from 13 November, as well at outdoor venues in Kyiv and elsewhere in Ukraine.

Printed photos were also placed around the capital close to CCTV cameras, in an attempt to use “surveillance technologies in a much more positive way”.