A haunting image of a toddler crying helplessly as she and her mother are taken into custody by the US border officials has won the prestigious World Press Photo Award 2019. The picture that had created an uproar was clicked by John Moore after a Honduran mother Sandra Sanchez and her daughter Yanela illegally crossed the US-Mexican border last year.
Judges said that the image clicked by Moore showed a different kind of violence that is psychological. The picture had caused an outcry about Washington’s controversial policy to separate thousands of migrants from their children. The public furore had caused President Donald Trump to reverse the policy in June last year.
The US Customs and Border Police Patrol had later said that Yanela and her mother were not separated from each other
Moore had captured the toddler on camera when he was taking pictures of the US Border Patrol agents in the Rio Grande Valley on June 12 last year. The patrol had come across a group of people who tried to cross the border.
Moore told the US-based National Public Radio broadcaster in an interview, “I could see the fear on their faces, in their eyes as the officials took their names. It was at that moment that he spotted Sandra and her daughter, who started crying when her mother put her down to be searched. I took a knee and had very few frames of that moment before it was over.”
Judges selected this year’s winners from 78,801 images entered by 4,738 photographers worldwide, the Amsterdam-based organizers said.
Three lensmen from AFP, John Wessels, Brendan Smialowski, and Pedro Pardo were handed one-second place and three third places overall in the various categories.
Last year also it was AFP’s Ronaldo Schemidt who won the World Press Photo Award with a fiery image of a masked Venezuelan protester in flames.