O que têm em comum todas estas imagens? São chocantes, violentas e – à excepção da última – foram premiadas pelo World Press Photo. Todas elas cumpriram a mais nobre função do jornalismo: informar. Sobre uma realidade distante, um conflito longínquo, uma emergência humanitária ou uma atroz falta de humanidade. Chamaram a atenção para problemas que urgia (e, em alguns casos ainda urge) resolver. A imagem de Aylan Kurdi, o menino sírio encontrado morto numa praia da Turquia, entra nesta categoria. Ela contém em cada um dos seus pixels uma tragédia com que é necessário lidar – e solucionar de vez. Publicá-la (e a outras) é quase uma obrigação de qualquer orgão de comunicação social. Os leitores não entenderiam de outra forma.
Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc sets himself ablaze in protest against the persecution of Buddhists by the South Vietnamese government. (Malcolm W. Browne)
The body of a Vietcong soldier is dragged behind an American armored vehicle en route to a burial site after fierce fighting. (Kyoichi Sawada)
South Vietnam national police chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan executes a suspected Viet Cong member. (Eddie Adams)
Phan Thi Kim Phuc (center) flees with other children after South Vietnamese planes mistakenly dropped napalm on South Vietnamese troops and civilians. (Nick Ut)
A starving boy and a missionary in Uganda. (Mike Wells)
The war in Lebanon: The aftermath of the massacre of Palestinians by Christian Phalangists in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. (Robin Moyer)
Kezban Özer (37) finds her five children buried alive after a devastating earthquake. At five o’clock in the morning she and her husband were milking the cows as their children slept. A few minutes later, 147 villages in the region were destroyed by an earthquake of magnitude 7.1 on the Richter scale; 1,336 people died. (Mustafa Bozdemir)
A child killed by the poisonous gas leak in the Union Carbide chemical plant disaster. (Pablo Bartholomew)
A mother carries her dead child to the grave, after wrapping it in a shroud according to local custom. A bad drought coupled with the effects of civil war caused a terrible famine in Somalia which claimed the lives of between one and two million people over a period of two years, more than 200 a day in the worst affected areas. The international airlift of relief supplies which started in July was hampered by heavily armed gangs of clansmen who looted food storage centers and slowed down the distribution of the supplies by aid organizations. (James Nachtwey)
The body of a one-year-old boy who died of dehydration is prepared for burial at Jalozai refugee camp. The child’s family, originally from North Afghanistan, had sought refuge in Pakistan from political instability and the consequences of drought. The family gave the photographer permission to attend as they washed and wrapped his body in a white funeral shroud, according to Muslim tradition. In the overcrowded Jalozai camp, 80,000 refugees from Afghanistan endured squalid conditions. (Erik Refner)
An Iraqi man comforts his four-year-old son at a holding center for prisoners of war, in the base camp of the US Army 101st Airborne Division near An Najaf. The boy had become terrified when, according to orders, his father was hooded and handcuffed. A soldier later severed the plastic handcuffs so that the man could comfort his child. Hoods were placed over detainees’ heads because they were quicker to apply than blindfolds. The military said the bags were used to disorient prisoners and protect their identities. It is not known what happened to the man or the boy. (Jean-Marc Bouju)
The fingers of malnourished Alassa Galisou (1) are pressed against the lips of his mother Fatou Ousseini at an emergency feeding center. One of the worst droughts in recent times, together with a particularly heavy plague of locusts that had destroyed the previous year’s harvest, left millions of people severely short of food. (Finbarr O’Reilly)
Bibi Aisha, an 18-year-old woman from Oruzgan province in Afghanistan, fled back to her family home from her husband’s house, complaining of violent treatment. The Taliban arrived one night, demanding Bibi be handed over to face justice. After a Taliban commander pronounced his verdict, Bibi’s brother-in-law held her down and her husband sliced off her ears and then cut off her nose. Bibi was abandoned, but later rescued by aid workers and the U.S. military. (Jodi Bieber)
The bodies of two-year-old Suhaib Hijazi and his elder brother Muhammad, almost four, are carried by their uncles to a mosque for their funeral, in Gaza City. (Paul Hansen)
A photo of Aylan Kurdi lying drowned on a Turkish beach has ignited anger at the UK’s response to the refugee crisis
