Asahi Shimbun photographer Toshiyuki Tsunenari's picture of a distraught woman surrounded by debris from the March 11 Great East Japan Earthquake won third prize in the General News Singles category of the annual World Press Photo contest.
Asahi Shimbun photographer Toshiyuki Tsunenari's picture of a distraught woman surrounded by debris from the March 11 Great East Japan Earthquake won third prize in the General News Singles category of the annual World Press Photo contest.
Tsunenari works at the newspaper's Tokyo head office.
The annual photo contest, now in its 55th year, is among the world's most prestigious. The winners were announced by the Netherlands-based World Press Photo Foundation on Feb. 10.
Tsunenari’s photo was captioned “Woman cries amid the ruins of Natori City, Japan, March 13.”
It shows a woman in Natori, Miyagi Prefecture, weeping on the roadside two days after Great East Japan Earthquake struck northeastern Japan.
The contest drew entries by 5,247 photographers from 124 countries and regions with 101,254 pictures submitted by the mid-January deadline.
Fifty-seven photographers were selected as winners.
The World Press Photo of the Year 2011 went to Samuel Aranda from Spain for his picture of a woman holding a wounded relative inside a mosque in Yemen. Aranda took the picture on Oct. 15.
Other Japanese winners included Koichiro Tezuka, a photographer for The Mainichi Shimbun and Yasuyoshi Chiba, who works for Agence France-Presse's Sao Paulo Bureau.
Tezuka won first prize in the Spot News Stories category and Chiba took top prize in the People in the News Stories category.
The World Press Photo 2012 exhibition, featuring the winning images, will be held at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, as well as in Osaka and other cities across Japan, starting in June.
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For more about the woman captured in Tsunenari's award-winning photograph, please access the AJW web site at