The Andrei Stenin Press Photo Contest: Winner Exhibition 2017

The Andrei Stenin International Photo Contest is an annual contest for young photojournalists aged between 18 and 33 years old. It is Russia’s only platform for discovering new photojournalists and for allowing them to make a name for themselves on the world photojournalism stage. In 2017, around 5000 entries by young photojournalists from 76 countries were submitted to the contest. The winning entries were exhibited around the world. In 2016 the exhibitions were run in Moscow, Istanbul, Cape Town, Cairo, Berlin, Shanghai, Rome, etc.

The exhibition of winning entries includes 50 works by young reporters from Russia, Spain, Greece, Serbia, Italy, India, China and South Africa.

For African participants, 2017 was a big year – South Africa’s Phandulwazi Jikelo won first place for his single “Grabouw housing protest” in the Top News category. Kenyan photographer Kevin Midigo took second place in the same category.

Their photographs, capturing fragments of political events, are part of a vivid kaleidoscope of issues that concern young photographers across the world. Among the central images of the fifty-piece exhibition are also the piercing story of people with little hope for the future, “Migrants in Belgrade”, by Spain’s Alejandro Martinez Velez; the “What?” series by Italian photographer Danilo Garcia Di Meo about a young Italian woman, Ambra, her courage and will to live; the black and white chronicle “Playing in the dark” by Russian Pavel Volkov about Paralympic soccer player Sergei Manzhos; and “Silent Howl” in which Shahnewaz Khan of Bangladesh dispassionately tells the story of children who are forced by circumstances to work to help their families survive.