Prague – The main prize in the Czech Press Photo 2022 competition was won by freelance photographer Vojtěch Dárvík's Máca Massacre in Buč. It is from a series of photographs documenting wartime events in the Ukrainian cities of Bucha and Irpin. The international jury selected the winning film from more than 6,000 works submitted to the 28th edition of the competition by 234 authors from the Czech Republic and Slovakia. People will be able to view the best images from the photojournalism competition from Wednesday until the end of July at the National Museum, where the organizers announced the results today.
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The winning image shows a murdered Buč resident lying on the street, a dog sitting next to him. “It is important to show even such shocking visual material, because people often do not know what really happened there. The victims were tortured, murdered, and the public must see these stories,” said a member of the jury, Ukrainian photographer Jevhen Maloletka.
As expected, images from Ukraine dominated this year's competition. Máca also won the News category with a series of pictures from Ukraine. The picture from Buča, taken by Gabriel Kuchta from Deník N, also took third place. All three first places in the Reportage category also belong to events from Ukraine. It was won by Milan Bureš from Respekt for the series of pictures Waiting for the train to safety documenting Ukrainian refugees.
ČTK reporters scored twice in the People Who Are Talked About category. It was won by Roman Vondrouš with the film Appointing the Prime Minister, in which President Miloš Zeman is in a glass bowl during this act at the castle in Lány during the anti-covid measures. Ondřej Deml took third place for the film entitled German Foreign Minister in Lidice. David Taneček from ČTK won third place in the Art and Culture category for his film Acoustic test, in which he captured a clarinet player during an acoustic test in a model of the new Ostrava concert hall.
In the category People and the Environment, the first third place was taken by images depicting the big domestic theme of the past year, the fire in Bohemian Switzerland. It was won by Michal Fanta and the third place belongs to Igor Mikul.
“The jury considered several strong series depicting the refugee crisis caused by the Russian invasion, but in the end the choice was influenced by the desire to show the reality of the war in Ukraine. Although we are all indirectly affected by the war, it is only the people of Ukraine who are exposed to the real horror of the conflict,” said the chairman of the jury, Petr Mlch, editor-in-chief of the ČTK photo bank.
“I stayed in Buča for several days. The mass grave with over 300 bodies of civilian victims, often brutally executed, became a sad symbol of this city. in Buča, a place has just been found where the Russians executed by shooting six people – two men, four women. One of the women was allegedly still underage. All those shot were doused with flammable liquid and set on fire, this is how the army wanted to cover their tracks. Buča, these are paintings collecting the human remains of murdered civilians, a dead man lying on the ground still clutching a bunch of house keys or a dog faithfully waiting by the body of its master,” Vojtěch Dárvík Máca described the creation of the photograph.
