The 2024 visual uses a photo from the 2023 winning report. This photograph taken by Siegfried Modola was part of his report shot between September 2022 and April 2023 inside Myanmar’s armed uprising.
Caption: Children hide in their school bomb shelter during an emergency drill in case of mortar shelling by government forces based a few kilometers from their town, on October 24, 2022, Kayah (Karenni) State, eastern Myanmar (Burma). The children do regular emergency drills in case of an attack.
Their town has been bombed three times in the last year. According to the United Nations, thousands of people have been killed, some 1.4 million have been displaced since the coup, and one-third of the country’s population needs humanitarian aid.
Siegfried Modola is a Kenya-raised independent Italian/British photojournalist and documentary photographer focusing on social, humanitarian, and geopolitical events. Modola’s career as a photojournalist took off when he started working for the Reuters news agency in Nairobi in 2010. Since then he has reported in over a dozen countries in Africa and has traversed the globe, venturing into diverse and often challenging environments to shed light on untold stories. He has worked in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and South America: From the post-coup d’etat conflict in Myanmar to the civil war in South Sudan and the conflict in Somalia to the chronic insecurity gripping the Central African Republic and Nigeria to the humanitarian crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
He has covered the Venezuelan refugee crisis on its borders, the depopulation of the Italian countryside, immigration issues in Italy/France, the 2014 Israel-Gaza war, the Syrian refugee crisis in northern Iraq in 2016 and the exodus of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh in 2017, 2018 and 2019. His photographs have appeared in some of the most prominent publications worldwide, raising awareness among viewers.