We’re very pleased and proud to report that friend of Bhopal, and Getty Images Reportage photographer, Giles Clarke has been granted the Award of Excellence in the 73rd annual ‘Pictures of the Year International’ competition held by the Reynolds Journalism Institute.
Giles has been visiting Bhopal regularly over the last seven years and the award was made for ‘Toxic Trespass’ his most recent work, shot around the time of the 31st anniversary of the disaster, which documents third generation victims of Union Carbide’s poisons.
The families of these children live in areas where they have been exposed to highly toxic chemicals in their drinking water and live very close to the solar evaporation ponds which are one of the main sources of these poisons. Toxic waste was dumped in the ponds, while the Union Carbide factory was in production, and chemicals from that dumped waste have leached down into the groundwater aquifer which has served as the area’s primary water supply for decades.
With great sadness, we must report that one of the children photographed here, Suraj Pratap Singh (seen in picture number 11) who suffered from an extremely severe spastic cerebral palsy, has died since the time of the shoot. VIEW GALLERY
