Thai Protest Photos Earn a Capa MedalBy JAMES ESTRIN
The convulsive political protests in Thailand last year were the first violent breaking news story that Agnes Dherbeys has covered. She sought to bring the same empathy that characterizes her feature work to the often bloody street scenes in Bangkok.
“I shoot with my feeling, whether I’m happy or scared,” she said. “You can still shoot with feeling and be objective to the story. As soon as you get close to a person, they become a person. Whether they are police or protesters — they’re not just statistics.”
Her approach has earned Ms. Dherbeys, 34, the Robert Capa Gold Medal Award from the Overseas Press Club of America. The medal honors the “best published photographic reporting from abroad requiring exceptional courage and enterprise.” Ms. Dherbeys, a freelancer, was on assignment for The New York Times. “Her images are close-up, powerful and direct,” the citation said.
She worked day and night, photographing clashes that saw antigovernment protesters both attacking soldiers as well as being attacked. Her images were an emotional rendering of the chaotic and dangerous scenes around her.
Lynsey Addario has won the Olivier Rebbot Award for photographs of Afghan women that appeared in National Geographic. (More recently on assignment for The Times, Ms. Addario was one of four journalists held captive in Libya last month, an experience she described in “It’s What I Do.”)
Daniel Berehulak of Getty Images has won the John Faber Award for his pictures of flooding in Pakistan.
And Rodrigo Abd of The Associated Press has won the Feature Photography Award for his pictures of an emergency room at a Guatemala hospital.
For Ms. Dherbeys, who was born in Korea and grew up in France, coverage of the violence in Bangkok — on streets not far from where she lives — was a departure from her previous work, mostly feature stories shot with medium-format cameras on black-and-white film. She began shooting digitally two years ago and is part of the VII photo agency’s mentor program.
When she walks through the streets of Bangkok now, she said, she sees few signs of the deadly protests. “Bangkok feels like a dream.” Ms. Dherbeys said. “The Thais cleaned up everything. There were bullet holes that they filled in immediately. You have the feeling that everything is so quiet. It’s like nothing really happened there.”
She also finds little public discussion of the events of last spring. She cites both “auto-censorship” and government censorship. Several of her images were removed from an exhibit in Bangkok after objections from local officials. For her next project, Ms. Dherbeys joined three other young photographers to document more than 240 rapes committed during a four-day rebel attack in eastern Congo.
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