To bring and host the annual exhibition of the World Press Photography (WPP) Foundation to China is a task that the representatives from the organization find challenging, Martha Echevarria, exhibitions manager and curator from the WPP Foundation told the Times.
Confronted with the lack of exhibitions on Chinese soil in the calendar of the renowned 2023 press photography awards worldwide, Echevarria said, “It is often challenging to bring the exhibition to China but we are trying our best to find local organizers who are interested in putting up the show and helping us bring our winning stories to more people.”
The representative from awards and exhibitions organizers also told the Times that an exhibition in the neighboring region of Hong Kong was “just confirmed,” possibly to take place in November this year.
As for other locations for the exhibition to be on display in the mainland, Echevarria noted that WPP has a new partner “who will try to organize the exhibition in Chengdu (in August), and potentially Guangzhou and/or Shanghai later in the year.”
On this year’s official calendar previously released, the only exhibition located in this part of the world is to be hosted in Taiwan’s capital city, Taipei, from October 21 to November 19 at Studio94.
Macau is once again out of the calendar for this year’s exhibition after several years of consecutive hosting by the “Casa de Portugal” Association (CPM).
Hosted for the last time back in 2020, the WPP Exhibition at Casa Garden was closed mid-way into the scheduled period, with the CPM stating at the time that the exhibition closure was due to “management reasons”.
Since then, the exhibition, that has been hosted in Macau since 2008, has not made a return although the same WPP official has noted the interest of the organization in bringing once again the exhibition to the territory in case there are “interested venues in Macau.”
To the Times, the president of the CPM, Amélia António, said in a previous conversation on the topic that the difficulties in bringing the exhibition to Macau were “mostly” related to budgeting as hosting would have the annual cost of about MOP200,000.
After the early closure of the Macau exhibition, there was an attempt from the Institute for Journalism and Society at Hong Kong Baptist University to host the same 2020 exhibition in Hong Kong this March 2021 but just three days before the event’s launching date the organizing committee canceled the event, citing Covid-19 safety concerns.
