Award-Winning Image Bears Witness to Delhi’s Lonely Pandemic Burials

(New York, NY — December 10, 2020) — Photography 4 Humanity, the photography pillar of the High Note Global Initiative, proudly announces Anindito Mukherjee as the winner of the 2020 High Note Global Prize in Photography. His unflinching image, Last Rites — taken in New Delhi at the height of the global pandemic — captures the lonely, contracted burials of COVID-19 victims whose families were forbidden from a final goodbye.

The announcement, made today on United Nations Human Rights Day, underscores how the COVID-19 pandemic became not only a public health emergency but a human rights crisis — exposing the inequalities of who lives, who dies, and who is permitted to grieve in dignity. Mukherjee’s image, taken in New Delhi, India, depicts municipal workers performing the final rites of pandemic dead, their loved ones absent, their funerals stripped of nearly every ritual humans have built around death.

Mukherjee, an Indian photojournalist whose work has been published by Reuters, Getty Images, Bloomberg, CNN, CBC, and VICE World News, would go on to document India’s catastrophic second wave with the same unflinching eye, photographing the overflowing crematoria of New Delhi that would come to define one of the pandemic’s most devastating chapters. His winning image stands as both an act of witness and an act of memorial — preserving the names, the silence, and the loss that the world’s reporting too often reduced to a number.

“In any human rights crisis, the right to dignified mourning is among the first to fall, and the last to be restored. Anindito Mukherjee’s photograph insists on the personhood of those the pandemic took, and on the personhood of those who were not permitted to say goodbye. To make work of this gravity in a year of unprecedented danger to photographers themselves is an act of courage as well as art.” — David Clark, founder, High Note Global

In official partnership with United Nations Human Rights, Photography 4 Humanity invites amateur and professional photographers from around the world to bear witness to the human dimension of our most urgent challenges. As one of the two founding pillars of the High Note Global Initiative — alongside High Note Music — the program stands for the conviction that a single image can move the conscience of the world.

This year, Photography 4 Humanity received thousands of submissions from across the globe. Mukherjee’s winning image and the top ten finalists will be exhibited at Fotografiska New York from December 10, 2020 through January 24, 2021, before traveling to a virtual exhibit hosted by United Nations Human Rights and viewed globally on UN.org.

For more information, visit www.photography4humanity.com.