It happens that photographs, when they are intensely expressive, don’t need many words to describe them. This is the case with the image by freelance Gazan photographer Loay Ayyoub that portrays a Palestinian mother crying while embracing a body wrapped in a blood-stained shroud (Islam requires that burial must take place as soon as possible), like the hands of this woman who recalls, in her pose and most painful anguish, our Madonna. The Tragedy of Gaza is the photographic series that won the short story section of the World Report Award and this photograph is the iconic image of the 16th edition of the Lodi Ethical Photography Festival directed by Alberto Prina and the Lodi-based Gruppo Fotografico Progetto Immagine.
Loay Ayyoub, “The Tragedy of Gaza” #1, 2023, © Loay Ayyoub, courtesy Festival Fotografia Etica Lodi
The 2025 edition of the Festival, also reproduced in a catalog published by emuse publishing house, is truly among the most interesting. Many of the exhibited projects leave an indelible mark, following the usual pendulum swinging between current events and the emergency of History (with a capital H) and the surprising and unprecedented stories (with a lowercase s). The synthesis that emerges after a day of visiting the eleven official exhibition venues is that of a world truly in pieces, with a widespread sense of death and a very diffuse smell of pain. As always and as it should be, very few images are endowed with artistic sense and, precisely Ayyoub’s photo, has an evident aesthetic element reminiscent of Renaissance religious art. But this is a reading that comes in a second or third moment, after having momentarily removed the harrowing sense of affliction and compassionate human indignation that it should evoke.
Jana Margarete Schuler, “Between Blood and Glitter” #1, © Jana Margarete Schuler, courtesy Festival Fotografia Etica Lodi
Palazzo Barni, in the heart of Lodi, hosts, in addition to The Tragedy of Gaza, five other photographic projects. The war in Ukraine, with that twentieth-century flavor due to the presence of trenches and barbed wire, is the theme of the project that won the spotlight award section of the WRA, In the Shadow of a Deadly Sky, by Italian freelance photographer Diego Fedele, capable of showing us what it means to live in the shadow of a constant threat. The master award section was won by the project of Colombian photojournalist Federico Ríos, entitled Paths of Desperate Hope. It is a humanity of mud that desperately tries to reach the United States from South America: and this humanity travels, among the many migration routes, that of Darién, a strip of land between Colombia and Panama, presided over by traffickers who, with their violent terror, have established an incendiary climate for all those who dare to flee from the fire (paraphrase of some beautiful verses by Juan Mosquera Restrepo).
Diego Fedele, “In The Shadows of Deadly Skies” #3, © Diego Fedele, courtesy Festival Fotografia Etica Loditival
The special mention of the master award was recognized to Italian photojournalist Cinzia Canneri with a black and white project among the most interesting of the Festival. Women’s Bodies as Battlefields tells through images the struggles of Eritrean and Tigrayan women in their resistance to rape as a weapon of war: these victims portrayed by Canneri transmit to us a sense of resistance, dignity and truly intense strength. Living to fight (and fighting to live) is the summary of a reportage from the martial arts gyms of Bangladesh, where, in the shadow of Muhammad Ali, born Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr., sport is much more than a simple recreational or competitive activity: We Live to Fight, by Bangladeshi photographer Md Zobayer Hossain Joati, is the project that won the student award section. Pro and against Western Europe, twentieth-century and digitized, are in almost equal parts the inhabitants of the former Soviet republic of Moldova, portrayed by German photographer Julius Nieweler. Whispers say: ‘War is Coming’ is the project that won the special mention of the student award section and shows very well this social identity suspended between opposing geopolitical aspirations and always in the midst of ‘voices saying that war is coming’.
Cinzia Canneri, “Women’s Body as Battlefields” #2, 2021, © Cinzia Canneri, courtesy Festival Fotografia Etica Lodi
The World Report Award also includes a section dedicated to the single shot, hosted at Banca Centropadana. The shattered human body of thirty-six-year-old Ukrainian veteran Zakhar Biryukov, in the impossible yet successful act of embracing his own son, and in the act of looking into our eyes by observing deeply the lens of Norwegian photographer Afshin Ismaeli, even with only the eye that survived the war attack, is certainly the single shoot worthy of the award. The war in Ukraine is still ongoing, but even if it were hopefully over, the scars of the fighting would remain forever. The section is an effective synthesis of the most important concept of the Festival: in thirty-two shots, we see the great themes scroll before our eyes, accompanied by unknown individual stories but capable of assuming universal value as well.
Afshin Ismaeli, “The Price of War”, © Afshin Ismaeli, courtesy Festival Fotografia Etica Lodi
The Lives of Others is the section that investigates the relationship between human beings and the places they inhabit. Hosted at Palazzo Modignani, it includes four projects that center on men and women. Men are the fathers of the series entitled Becoming a Father, in which American photographer Adriana Zehbrauskas takes us to various parts of the world to enter the relationship between fathers and newborn children. The first thousand days of the newborns strongly influence their well-being and growth and the photographer puts us in front of the hygienically approximate cord of an African obstetrics ward and the gleaming IV tube of a Western ward. German photographer and documentarian Jana Margarete Schuler explores the sisterhood of Mexican women living in Ciudad Juarez, one of the world’s most dangerous cities – especially for women – and situated on the border with Texas. Between Blood and Glitter shows us how, to defend themselves from violence, groups of women have organized themselves into lucha libre teams, a sort of boxing and wrestling in which perhaps the violence is fiction while the violence on the street, unfortunately, is not. Pier Paolo Pasolini would have liked some photographs of the project with the poetic title of Where Dust and Water Dream Together, by Tunisian Khlif Skander. In the series, the author effectively explores the connection with the land, also recalling atmospheres traceable to Maria Lai, of a community living in Tunisia in places permeated by water and desert dust. David J Shaw instead takes us to Caeadda (which is also the name of the project), in the heart of rural Wales, where, among Ken Loach-like human figures and traditional bonds, the author shows us how ancient traditions, agriculture and livestock farming, can still be transmitted between different generations even in the heart of the West.
Skander Khlif, “Where Dust and Water Dream Together” #1, © Skander Khlif, courtesy Festival Fotografia Etica Lodi
NGO (or Non-Profit) Space is the section hosted at Chiostro dell’Ospedale Vecchio and, since its origins, has been characterized by highlighting small great social stories strongly imbued with solidarity and concrete support. This is naturally the case with EMERGENCY which, among the many areas where it operates, has in Kurdistan a hospital specialized in making prostheses for amputated limbs. The Artisans of Prosthesis, by RAI photoreporter Giammarco Sicuro, is the necessary photographic testimony of Hawzhin’s smile who, despite having lost a hand due to a mine, became a seamstress thanks to a prosthesis and Satar, craftsman of this indispensable support in his workshop where the face of Gino Strada stands out. Roma Calcio is among the main Italian soccer teams for the blind and the series by Lorenzo Foddai reveals its rules, but above all the social atmosphere that one breathes during a sporting event, showing us the protagonists of ASD Roma Blind Football. Football Vibes is the name of a reality that effectively is based on invisible and innumerable vibrations that strike the movements of the players on the field. Freelance photographer Bente Stachowske allows us to know the Nyodeema Foundation, yet another female-led reality that supports work inclusion, in this case courageous beekeepers. The courage of these women is both physical because the women challenge often dangerous elements of nature, and social because they work at night challenging the prohibitions imposed by the social conventions of the Gambian villages where the project Beekeepers of Mosolula Gardino is set. Like In the Green Border by Agnieszka Holland, the Polish Karol Grygoruk allows us to enter the daily life of the NGOs Minority Rights Group International and Grupa Granica that operate on the border between Poland and Belarus in support of migrants who, on the border between the European Union and territories outside the EU, hope to finally find rest in their very long journey from the heart of Asia. As in the film, but unfortunately with painfully real connotations, the photographs of Borderlands show us the cruel clandestinity to which these human beings are obliged who use cell phones and Google Maps as instruments and compass of hope.
Skander Khlif, “Where Dust and Water Dream Together” #1, © Skander Khlif, courtesy Festival Fotografia Etica Lodi
The one in Sudan is one of the many, too many conflicts that bloody the world. Inside the nave of the sixteenth-century Church of Carmine, photojournalist Giles Clarke shows us its devastating effects on the population with a project entitled Sudan Under Siege and, as always in the face of wars lasting many years, one can perceive their effects of pain in the decades to follow. It is a dance with arctic wolves that is staged at the Gardens Viale IV Novembre, where Ronan Donovan shows us the animal pride in The Wolves of the High Arctic. The photographic series is not only social intelligence exhibited by these magnificent animals, but also an alert against global warming that is also changing these habitats. Still lifes, objects of daily life and immense suffering is what is on display at the Ex Cavallerizza, where the thirtieth anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide is staged. The photographic project curated by the VII Foundation in the form of a collective of various Balkan photojournalists. The gaze, in fact, widens to all the stages of the conflicts that bloodied the former Yugoslavia, and Endgame: Yugoslavia. 30 Years since the Genocide in Srebrenica puts us in front of a vocabulary sadly present also in today’s contemporary world.
100_South America_Stories_Musuk Nolte_Panos Pictures_Bertha Foundation
A dive into the territorial sphere is that of the Elegia lodigiana staged in the nearby municipality of Montanaso Lombardo. The project by Gabriele Cecconi immerses us in a rarefied typically Po Valley atmosphere, apparently placid like the Adda and the Po, but in the folds made of light and shadow. We had perhaps encountered the mega plastic dumps (practically the whole planet), the chemical waste dumps, the electronic equipment dumps but, perhaps, we had not yet seen the immense dumps of fashionable fast fashion. The apocalyptic landscape of what we throw away, perhaps after wearing it only a few times, is before our eyes, in the cloister of Palazzo della Provincia, thanks to the impressive project by photojournalist Magnus Wennman who arrives in Ghana to show us The Dark Side of Fast Fashion, where the real landscape consists of mountains of “white people’s dead clothes”, as these products are called by local inhabitants. Fifteen years of World Report Award are on stage at the Chiesa dell’Angelo, where literally all the projects of this fundamental photographic competition to witness the social history of the world scroll by. The need to document humanity is on stage, thanks to the only Lombard venue of the World Press Photo, in the premises of Fondazione Banca Popolare di Lodi, where one enters the history of recent decades. Impossible to report here the vastness of social, political, economic and especially human issues present in this summary section: the only advice – which applies to almost the entire Festival – is to equip yourself with plenty of time, notebooks and psychological robustness to observe the infinite pain of a world literally in pieces.
Info:
LODI ETHICAL PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL
Open on weekends from September 27 to October 26, 2025 from 9:30 to 20:00
10 venues in Lodi and one in Montanaso Lombardo
www.festivaldellafotografiaetica.it
I am Giovanni Crotti, born in 1968, and I feel obliged to thank writing because it drives my life. I cultivate within me multitudes that lead me to investigate, know, and deepen every cultural and creative expression, and then write about it, always trying to be clear and documented in the contents.
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