1) War is Personal

“My favorite is titled ‘War is Personal’,” Gloudemans begins. This artwork by Julia Kochetova may not be what you expect to see in a photography competition. Instead of a “pure” photograph, it’s a collage of multiple photographs mixed with drawings and short poems. “Nowadays, World Press Photo also has a category called ‘Open Format’, to give recognition to photographers who work with multimedia forms,” Gloudemans explains.

For this project, Kochetova, who is Ukrainian herself, documented the impact of the war in Ukraine. “While news media update their audience with statistics and maps and international attention drifts elsewhere, the daily experience of Ukrainians living through the war is hard to comprehend for people outside the country,” reads the description of the artwork on the World Press Photo website. “Every day, we’re confronted with terrible images of wars and disasters, and read statistics on numbers of deaths, leaving us numb to all the suffering we see,” Gloudemans adds. “This work tries to bring back the personal aspect. These are not statistics, they’re people.”

“War is Personal” can also be viewed digitally by visiting the followinginteractive website.

2) Saving the Monarchs

Gloudemans’ second favorite is called “Saving the Monarchs”. “This one stuck with me because it’s such a positive story,” she says. “Saving the Monarchs” is a series of multiple photos (see also main photo) taken by Jaime Rojo, featuring the monarch butterfly.

This migratory butterfly – which migrates between Mexico, the United States and Canada – has seen its population decline by more than eighty percent since the 1990s. “This is mainly because the natural habitats of this butterfly are gradually disappearing, for example through deforestation,” explains Gloudemans. “This is why a large-scale project was launched in which Mexico, the United States and Canada work together to restore the monarch butterfly’s habitat, which can be seen in the photos.”

3) No Man’s Land

“No Man’s Land” is the third and final work in Gloudemans’ top three. It tells the story of the coal mining activities in the North Rhine-Westphalia region of Germany. Since the late 1940s, around 50 villages in this state have been destroyed by excavations for coal mines, according to the World Press Photo website. “Residents are simply bought out and forced to leave,” Gloudemans adds.

In 2012, a large group of protesters took action to block the planned excavation of six villages and forest areas. They settled in the abandoned houses of villages that had already been evacuated, built and lived in tree houses in adjacent forest areas and chained themselves to construction sites. “The photographer (Daniel Chatard, Ed.) followed the protesters and the local communities that were forced to relocate.”