Telegraph’s Townsley named Photographer of the Year
Telegraph photographer Simon Townsley – who works for the Global Health Security desk – has been named Photographer of the Year at the Press Awards 2024.
Judges described Townsley’s work as having “a stillness and poignancy” that “belies the underlying heartbreak”.
He was not the only Telegraph winner at the Press Awards. As well as winning Photographer of the Year, the Telegraph was named News Website of the Year and Broadsheet Front Page of the Year, for its Lockdown Files investigation.
Chris Leadbetter was named Travel Journalist of the Year and Telegraph photographer Heathcliff O’Malley was also highly commended in the same category as Townsley.
The judges said: “There’s a stillness and poignancy to the photojournalist Simon Townsley’s work that belies the underlying heartbreak. The effect has much to do with light and contrasts. In one example, a father holding his young daughter stands by the grave of his wife, dead to Covid. They are caught in a cold sunlight that also silvers the serried ranks of headstones and the undersides of the lowering clouds, in a shot that conveys grief, loss and a future that might have been.
“In another photo, the monochrome devastation of the Kahramanmaraş earthquake in Turkey – grey, twisted wire, rubble and a column of seemingly stunned, black-clothed people – is relieved only by a blue body bag in the bucket of a yellow mechanical digger, and the dried-blood-red of an emergency vehicle.
“The quiet desperation of people in a refugee camp in the Democratic Republic of Congo, pressed against a wire fence with their arms outstretched towards the sacks of scarce food arriving on aid workers’ backs, is evident in a shot whose colours seem as faded as their hopes.”
Below are the images submitted to the Press Awards – and some words from Townsley on how he captured them.
The forgotten victims of the pandemic
“When Josh Willis picked me up from the airport he explained that he visited the grave of his wife every day. I went with him and his two daughters and they shared their story of losing Samatha, their mum, to Covid.
“Eviegrace (pictured), who was born just before her death, was baptised during the funeral service. I wondering how people can be as strong as they are.”
Student, newborn baby and family of six are latest survivors pulled from earthquake rubble
“I spent days in Turkey following the earthquake, waiting together with the crowds as they watched the rescue operation turn into a recovery operation, but never giving up hope.
“As the scale of the horror unfolded it became almost an industrial operation, the numbers were so great. Having to use mechanical equipment in the face of such devastation the work was still undertaken with such tenderness and respect.”
Inside the besieged city of Goma, where food is fast running out – and sexual violence is rife
“Goma is a place like no other. As one aid worker told me, the situation is so terrible here nobody notices when things get worse. Yet they are getting much worse, and Goma is so far down the list now in receiving aid that it isn’t likely to improve for a long time to come.
“I met with women so desperate to find food that they were prepared to face the prospect of rape every day in the forest, they have no other choice.”
Last year, Townsley was also named Photo Journalist of the Year at the Society of Editors’ Media Freedom Awards (MFA)
Below are more of his award-winning images.
Risking snakes and toxic gases in the ‘world’s worst job’
“If there is a worse job in the world than sewer worker I have never come across it. Spending a week in India with the men who climb into unspeakably foul spaces alive with insects, spiders and snakes was beyond anything I have ever experienced.
“By any standards nobody should have to endure working conditions that involve submerging in rivers of unimaginable filth with the ever present threats of death by drowning, disease or animal bite, all for pitifully less than £5 a day.”
The ‘road of death’: A treacherous, jungle trafficking route lined with rotting corpses
“The Darien Gap is a 60 mile missing stretch of the trans-America highway between Columbia and Panama. There are no roads, or even tracks, just a jungle that takes at least ten days to cross. Many don’t make it out alive, there is absolutely no help for the sick or injured.
“At any given moment there are probably 5000 men, women and children from all over the world trying to make it through on their journey to the United States. I was photographing a desperate sea of migrants on the edge of a river at five o’clock one morning and got tangled in the mooring lines of canoes in the darkness.
“I fell face-first with my cameras into the mud of the riverbank. Everyone rushed to help me, picking me up and asking if I was OK. I was overwhelmed by the kindness of people with nothing and who were enduring so much caring about what happened to me.”
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