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.
