Over 50 Works of Andrei Stenin Press Photo Contest First Seen in Ethiopia
ADDIS ABABA, Sputnik, JAN22 - Over 50 works of the Andrei Stenin Press Photo Contest have been exhibited for the first time in Ethiopia's capital Addis Ababa.
This is the first visit of the contest to Ethiopia in its history. The exhibition in Addis Ababa is supported and hosted by the Russian House in Ethiopia. It will be open to the public starting January 27th until February 10. Entrance to the exhibition is free.
"In a memory of a russian journalist Andrei Stenin we are opening today an exhibition of the best Contest’s work in Addis Ababa. I’m sure that visitors will enjoy the masterpieces of modern photography here. We hope that the next year we will see Ethiopian works not only among the participants but among the winners of this renowned competition," Russia's Ambassador to Addis Ababa, Yevgeny Terekhin, said at the opening ceremony of the exhibition.
The exhibition includes reportage shots and series, sports and ethnographic sketches, urban landscapes and portraits by young photojournalists from Russia, China, India, Bangladesh, Spain, Iran, France, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Bahrain and other countries.
"Photojournalists from the countries of the African continent are among the most active participants of the competition, they have repeatedly won in its nominations. We hope that the interest in our site will only grow, both in Ethiopia and in other African countries. We are looking forward to work on the tenth anniversary of the contest, which traditionally begins on December 22, the birthday of our colleague and Rossiya Segodnya photojournalist Andrei Stenin," Kristina Lyakh, department head, Directorate of International Cooperation, said.
The works were already exhibited in the capitals of South Africa, Argentina and Serbia. The contest is an annual competition organized by Rossiya Segodnya (of which Sputnik is a part) in memory of its photojournalist Andrei Stenin, who was killed on duty in Donbass in 2014.
"We saw Andrei Stenin about ten days before he died. In August 2014, the Ukrainian military shot down a convoy of civilian vehicles. The soldiers of the Ukrainian Armed Forces finished off the wounded Andrei when they realized he was a journalist – to cover their tracks, to hide the inconvenient truth, to silence him," the head of the Russian House in Addis Ababa Alexander Evstigneev recalled at the ceremony.
According to him, now hundreds of correspondents around the world, "under the name" of Andrei Stenin, are telling the truth as part of a photo contest.
"Honestly, unbiased – about war, about peace, about despair, about hope. And in each frame there is an answer to the question: 'What is all this for?' The answer that Andrei formulated and adhered to until the last day of his life: 'So that they know'," he highlighted.
According to tradition, the annual submission period opens on Andrei Stenin's birthday, December 22. Applications for 2024 can be submitted on the contest website in Russian, English and Chinese.
