World Press Photo (WPP) prize winner Mikhail Tereshchenko, a staff photographer for the Russian state-controlled media outlet TASS, is no longer welcome at the organization’s award ceremony after Georgian journalists accused WPP of reinforcing Russian propaganda.
Tereshchenko won the WPP’s prestigious annual regional award last month for a series of photographs capturing last year’s historic anti-government protests in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi. Demonstrators in the country, which emerged as an independent state when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, took to the streets early last November to protest the pro-Russia ruling party’s obstruction of Georgia’s efforts to join the European Union and its widely disputed election results.
Like other WPP prize recipients, Tereshchenko had been invited to attend an award ceremony held during the opening of a global touring exhibition featuring the winners’ work.
But given backlash from Georgian journalists who point to TASS’s lack of editorial independence as an insult to the very anti-authoritarian movement the agency’s photographs capture, the WPP announced that Tereshchenko would be excluded from the April 18 event, citing “the increased tensions on the European continent.” Tereshchenko also reportedly referred to Russia’s 2022 violent siege and ongoing occupation of the city of Mariupol as an act of “liberation” in an interview last month, a viewpoint the WPP said it does not agree with.
The organization did not rescind the photographer’s award, and his work will still be included in an exhibition touring Europe, North America, and South America for the next year.
Georgian journalist Aleksandre Keshelashvili, who was detained and severely beaten by riot police during an anti-government protest, decried WPP’s decision to award Tereshchenko the prize.
“The demonstrators in the award-winning photographs are people fighting back against the very same forces that TASS protects and serves,” Keshelashvili wrote in a March 29 statement on Facebook. “This decision undermines independent media and amplifies propaganda, and allows false narratives to gain broader acceptance.”
WPP, in an April 1 statement, said the photos had been judged anonymously, meaning that jury members did not know the identity of the photojournalists nor their attached media outlets.
The organization said it will “look to improve” its rules for entries from state-controlled agencies and consult photographers working under “oppressive regimes.”
Jurors said the series featured an “important global story” and that the night photographs captured pro-European Union protesters’ use of fireworks as a “new urban weapon” in self-defense against police.
TASS Director Andrey Kondrashov said the rescinded invitation signaled broader European “Russiaphobia.”
In the same statement announcing its decision to disinviteTereshchenko, WPP also apologized for its competition jury’s classification of an image of a Ukrainian soldier conscripted to serve in Russian forces (“Underground Field Hospital” by Nanna Heitmann for the New York Times) and a photo of a six-year-old Ukrainian girl suffering from panic attacks (“Beyond the Trenches” by Florian Bachmeier) as a “visual pair.”
During protests like the ones captured by Tereshchen for TASS, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders, Georgian authorities engaged in widespread police brutality against journalists with impunity.
World Press Photo, a Netherlands nonprofit organization, has recognized some of the most ubiquitous images of war and atrocity since its first award cycle in 1955, including Associated Press photographer Nick Ut’s monumental 1972 image of nine-year-old Phan Thị Kim Phúcas fleeing a napalm attack.
Last year, the press competition recognized Reuters photographer Mohammad Salem’s image of a Palestinian woman clutching the body of her niece killed by an Israeli airstrike with its highest honor of Photo of the Year.