Antonio Aragón Renuncio, Spain
Spanish photographer Antonio Aragón Renuncio looks back on countless international publications and awards, and has founded a charity to support medical projects at the Gulf of Guinea. He has taught photography at various universities and founded a photography association. He was editor-in-chief of a magazine in Nicaragua and has organized festivals.
Eight-year-old Ivan is all smiles, looking forward to getting a new orthosis to stabilize his mobility system. A small scene in the Don Orione Center in Bonoua, Côte d’Ivoire. Here they operate on people with physical disabilities like congenital clubfeet and provide medical and psychological care. A rehab department and a training centre for trades complete the set-up.
The Don Orione Center also plays an important social role in education about diseases and especially about disabilities, in African countries often seen as so scary that sufferers are thought to have become possessed by a demon or to have dubious supernatural powers.
Spanish photographer Antonio Aragón Renuncio has caught this moment of happiness in the little boy, when a personal victory over fate is on the horizon.
We are not the only ones to applaud this photographer. Renuncio looks back on countless international publications and awards, and has founded a charity to support medical projects at the Gulf of Guinea. He has taught photography at various universities and founded a photography association. He was editor-in-chief of a magazine in Nicaragua and has organized festivals.
Of the Don Orione Center he writes: What the little patients experience here will allow them “to leave the floor”. To stand up, not just physically. In other words: Renuncio has given us the image of a moment in which a child may be able to make peace with all the limitations and pain it has experienced.
(Laudatio by Peter-Matthias Gaede)