dpa photographers among winners of World Press Photo Awards 2020: Farouk Batiche winner of Spot News Single category / Oliver Weiken wins third place in Spot News Story

Berlin (ots) - Two dpa photographers, Farouk Batiche and Oliver Weiken, have been honored at this year's World Press Photo Awards. Farouk Batiche wins first place in the Spot News Single category. His striking photo "Demonstrations in Algeria" shows protesters in a confrontation with police in May 2019. Oliver Weiken took third place in the Spot News Story category. His photo story "Explosion in Cairo" was shot in the moments after a terrorist attack in the Egyptian capital in August 2019. A total of 4,282 photographers entered into the running for the World Press Photo Awards with just under 74,000 images. The winners were announced late yesterday evening.

dpa editor-in-chief Sven Gösmann said: "The awards for two dpa photographers from one of the world's most important journalism prizes underscores the excellence and relevance of dpa reporting from across the globe. With their work, Farouk Batiche and Oliver Weiken demonstrate what dpa stands for: independent and verified journalism that is very close to the action but always maintains the necessary professional distance, even and especially in extreme situations like those depicted in the award-winning pictures."

Farouk Batiche (39) has more than 20 years' experience in photojournalism and reports from Algeria and North Africa. He began his career as a photographer at the Newpressphoto photo agency in Algiers in the late 1990s in collaboration with Sipa Press and Associated Press (AP). From 2011, during the Arab Spring protests, he worked as a freelancer for Reuters. His photos from this period were exhibited at the "Visa pour l'image 2012" photo festival in Perpignan, France. Between 2011 and 2016, Farouk Batiche worked for Agence France-Presse (AFP). He has been reporting for the German Press Agency (dpa) since 2019.

Oliver Weiken (36) launched his career as a press photographer in 1996 with the Warsteiner Anzeiger regional newspaper while still at school, and shortly afterwards joined the Bongarts sports photography agency. In 2003, he joined the German Press Agency as a young photographer before moving to the European Press Photo Agency (epa), for which he worked for eleven years across Europe, Asia and the Middle East. In 2017, he returned to dpa to set up the new English photo service and to work as the chief photographer for the Middle East and North Africa from the photo hub in Cairo.

Original captions:

"Demonstrations in Algeria", 21.05.2019

Algeria, Algiers: Algerian students and riot police scuffle during an anti-government demonstration. Algeria's military chief of staff on Monday rejected calls to postpone the country's presidential elections, slated for July 4 to elect a successor to ousted president Abdelaziz Bouteflika. Photo: Farouk Batiche/dpa

"Explosion in Cairo", 05.08.2019

Egypt, Cairo: Firefighters extinguish a fire after an explosion in front of the National Cancer Institute. According to Health Ministry, at least 17 people died and 26 injured. Photo: Oliver Weiken/dpa

All winners of the World Press Photo Awards 2020:

https://www.worldpressphoto.org/collection/photocontest/winners/2020

About dpa-Bildfunk

dpa-Bildfunk illustrates daily news from Germany and around the world. Every day, in addition to dpa's own photojournalism, numerous topical photos from the world's best agencies are adopted into the Bildfunk wire, which showcases more than 1000 pictures a day from around the world. Another 200,000 photos are processed annually for the image database. These regional, national and international offerings are produced at dpa picture desks in Berlin, Buenos Aires, Madrid, Cairo, Sydney and in the editorial office of dpa's subsidiary zb Fotoagentur Zentralbild, while the dpa subsidiary picture alliance provides access to more than 80 million images.

About dpa

The German News Agency (dpa) was founded in 1949 and is one of the world's leading independent news agencies. dpa supplies media outlets, businesses and other organizations with editorial content, including text, photos, videos, graphics, audio and other formats. As an international agency, dpa reports in four languages: German, English, Spanish and Arabic. The company has around 1,000 journalists in more than 150 locations in Germany and abroad. Its shareholders are 179 German media companies. Staff work according to the principles outlined in the dpa statute: independently from ideologies, businesses and governments. The central editing desk, under the leadership of editor-in-chief Sven Gösmann, is located in Berlin. The management team, headed by chairman Peter Kropsch, is based in Hamburg. The chairman of the Supervisory Board is David Brandstätter (Main-Post GmbH, Würzburg).

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Additional content: https://www.presseportal.de/pm/8218/4573212 OTS: dpa Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH

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