Amber Bracken, "Kamloops Residential School," for The New York Times
Amber Bracken, an Edmonton freelance photographer, has won a prestigious international prize for her photograph of red dresses hanging on crosses near a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C.
Bracken, who was on assignment for the New York Times, won Photo of the Year in the World Press Photo Contest for an image of a dress catching the evening sun during a break in rainy weather on June 19, 2021.
The dresses, hung along a roadside, commemorate children who died at the Kamloops Indian Residential School, one of many such institutions across the country set up to assimilate Indigenous children. Some 215 unmarked graves were recently detected at the school.
"It feels weird for something that's about such a sad and difficult reality to be aesthetically beautiful," Bracken told the Toronto Globe and Mail. "But weirdly, that's something I’m aiming for almost all of the time. Because, for better or worse, we care more about things that are beautiful. So even dark and difficult things, when they're beautiful, we pay attention."
The jury cited the image as representing the shameful history of colonial oppression.
"It is a perfect image which captures a rare light, and is at once haunting, arresting and symbolic. The sensory image offers a quiet moment of reckoning with the global legacy of colonization and exploitation, while amplifying the voices of First Nations communities who are demanding justice. The single image requires an active eye, and encourages us to hold governments, social institutions and ourselves accountable."
Bracken, who got her start at the Edmonton Sun, now works for clients that include National Geographic, the Globe and Mail and the Wall Street Journal. Her work, which explores intersections of race, environment, culture and decolonization, has recently focused on intergenerational trauma in Indigenous communities, the Wet'suwet'en land rights fight in British Columbia, and the impact of race in her own family.
In 2017, she won first prize in the Amsterdam-based contest's contemporary issues category for photos of protesters at the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota.
Source: World Press Photo