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Korean photographer Jean Chung has won one of the six grand prizes at the International Photojournalism Festival of Perpignan in France. The 36-year-old freelance photographer has been touring famine and conflict sites around the world.
Chung will be given the International Award for Humanitarian Reportage granted by human rights organization CARE at the renowned photography festival which gathers some 180,000 participants. She is the first Asian to receive the prize. Chung will attend the awards ceremony in Perpignan on Sept. 6, hold an exhibition there and receive 8,000 euros in prize money.
In a telephone interview with the Chosun Ilbo, Chung said, "It's my first prize since I started freelancing. I'm overwhelmed by the huge prize." She won the award for a series of ten photos that document a 26-year-old Afghan mother giving birth to a baby and dying of complications.
"Afghanistan has the number two maternal mortality rate, after Sierra Leone," Chung said. "I designed the work to let the world know of the country's situation in which a mother dies after giving birth every 27 minutes."
Chung has been visiting troubled areas around the world, including the Afghan interior and tsunami ravaged Thailand. An art student in her earlier days, she graduated from Seoul National University's Oriental Painting College of Arts in 1993.
She studied photography at New York University and worked in the U.S. for a while as a photojournalist. After getting her master's degree in photojournalism from the University of Missouri, she began to travel the globe. Her first important work was a New York Times spread detailing the destruction caused by the tsunami in Thailand in late 2004. Since then she's been active both at home and abroad.
It's been a year since Chung left for Afghanistan, which she chose because of its focus in the news. Tough challenges are a given. It's dangerous for a woman to walk on the street alone in Afghanistan, even in broad daylight. Chung said she has gotten lost for days in the countryside because of flooding and landslides.
"It takes four or five hours on a donkey for a pregnant woman to get to a hospital, and should a landslide come she could die," Chung said. "The most difficult part is when interviewees don't open up. But the difficulties are bearable if I can let the world know of the situation here and touch readers."
All Chung thinks of now is her work. Despite her loved ones' concern, she says she feels compelled to work in the world's most dangerous regions because "I want to be on the news sites with other world-renowned photojournalists." She added, with a smile, "I put my fate in Allah's hands."
(englishnews@chosun.com )
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