Migrant crisis the focus in a globally acclaimed photo exhibition

The World Press Photo exhibition has opened in Budapest’s Museum of Ethnography.

The jury selected the winning works from more than 80,000 pictures by photographers from all over the world. No surprise, the dominating theme this year was the global migration crisis.

Photo of the year went to Australia’s Warren Richardson for his image of a baby being handed to a Syrian refugee through a razor-wire fence.

“The exhibition powerfully reflects THE determining event of the year : the migration crisis, this exodus which started and no one knows when it will stop, and the question is how people react to it,” said Tamas Revesz, the curator.

Also running at the Ethnographic Museum, is an exhibition dubbed ‘Exodus’, which shows the Pulitzer Prize-winning works of Reuters photographers, on the same theme.

It includes the works of two Hungarian photographers, László Balogh and Bernadett Szabó. Bernadett said they worked 5 weeks non-stop, so it was hard to process what was happening.

“The camera is like a glass wall between me and reality. If I start thinking about what I’m seeing, then I’ll think ‘Oh my god’ and put down the camera and start crying, but then there would be no pictures,” she added.

In a vote on closing the door to refugees, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban suffered an embarrassing setback on Sunday, after he failed to convince a majority of his population to vote in an anti-immigration referendum.

Both photo exhibitions run at the Museum of Ethnography in Budapest until October 23.

Euronews