This week, we feature five winning images from the Global Peace Photo Award 2022. The award goes to those photographs that “best express the idea that our future lies in peaceful coexistence.“

Indian photographer Sourav Das won the main prize—”Peace Image of the Year”—at the Global Peace Photo Award 2022 with an image from his reportage, “A Small but Great Victory Over the Pandemic.”

Das’ image conveys how, during the global Corona-related education emergency, the initiative of Indian teacher Deepnarayan Nayak moved the school in his village outdoors and turned the walls of his village’s houses into school blackboards. He painted the precautions against infection on the walls, taught the children how to use masks, and made them attend school outdoors in safe distance to each other.

Ukrainian photographer Artem Humilevskiy won the Alfred Fried Peace Medal for his project “Giant”, which this image is from.

In a tribute about the work delivered in the Austrian Parliament, former long-time editor of German GEO Magazine Peter Matthias Gaede said, “What we see is a very, very heavy man. We see the strange, comical, ridiculous, puzzling, touching, bizarre, absurd, also lovable, poses he takes up. We think he knows no embarrassment. We wonder. We don’t know him. But of course, we look. And then…we begin to ask ourselves: Why does he do that? Who is he? What does he want to tell us?”

Gaede continued: “What we celebrate here—apart from a highly original and courageous photographic work—is a refreshing end to body shaming. It is a call to meet people of any shape (you could also say skin color, religion, origin, ethnic group) with tolerance. To not turn away if someone does not correspond to our stereotypes of normality. It is nothing less than the human right to diversity.”

Iranian photographer Maryam Firuzi, another Alfred Fried Peace Medal winner of the Global Peace Photo Award 2022, won for her series, “The Scattered Memories of a Distorted Future.” The image below is from that project.

“In this series, ruins have become a metaphor for pain,” said Firuzi. “Here, between a silent past and a distorted future, I invited female painters to paint what they like in abandoned places; a painting on the masculine history, a picture on the face of the past, and an unanswered question for the future.”

Ana Maria Arévalo Gosen also won an Alfred Fried Peace Medal, for her project, “Sinfonía Desordenada.”

Gosen’s photo project plays out against the background of big crises in the land of her birth, Venezuela. “This is about a project to rescue young people from a descent into a life of drugs and crime, by integrating them into a youth orchestra,” said Gaede. Members of the professional ensemble teamed up with street kids for a series of arrangements and eventually there were also two public concerts in the streets.

The image above, from Arévalo’s project, is of Euddy Bahamonte, 27, who posed for a portrait with his trombone at his home in San Agustin on August 10, 2021. Music recordings were made in various living quarters during COVID lockdown, on mobile phones and remixed later on.

Zoya Yaedon, a 10-year-old from Mauritius, won The Children’s Peace Image of the Year for this image of herself. She uses a Leica of her father’s to take photographs.

Gaede described the image as “floating, not drowning, surrounded by dancing light and a deep blue. Dreaming in a peaceful sea.”

Dig into our Photo of the Day archives for even more eye-catching portraits and photos. You can submit your editorial, documentary and other interesting images to: [email protected].