Unicef Photo of the Year

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Children playing in the fields, a burning oil depot in the background. The Polish photographer Patryk Jaracz has been honored for a photograph taken in western Ukraine.

In the picture, three girls can be seen in a meadow in western Ukraine. Five-year-old Alina is learning to ride a bike, and in the background, a cloud of black smoke rises menacingly from an oil depot.

Jaracz had captured a very moving scene with a very oppressive contrast. The war hangs like a dark cloud over the children’s everyday lives. Nevertheless, the photo also shows hope. Surrounded by bad news, we owe it to children worldwide to do everything we can to move good news into our everyday focus. Humans are resilient, we adjust and we are capable of turning precarious situations into acceptable ones.

We do that because we have to survive and we have to continue living.

The image symbolizes “The light of childlike resilience and joy that breaks through the darkness of global wars, conflicts, and disasters,” Unicef said.

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Patryk Jaracz, born in 1990, had previously worked in London and Toronto before he decided to pursue documentary photography and film. While reporting on the protests against Belarusian dictator Lukashenko in Minsk, Jaracz himself was arrested and tortured.

Jaracz has been living in Kyiv since the beginning of 2022, reporting exclusively on the war in Ukraine for print media and TV stations in Germany and other European countries. For him, Ukraine is a place where “not only the future of this one country will be decided”.