Finbarr O'Reilly

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Finbarr O'Reilly (* 1971 in Swansea , Wales ) is a Canadian - British journalist , photographer , documentary filmmaker and author .

Life

Finbarr O'Reilly was born in Swansea, Welsh in 1971 and spent the first years of his life in Dublin, Ireland . When he was nine years old, his family settled in Vancouver , Canada .

After a one-year backpacking trip through Africa, he studied at the state Ryerson University in Toronto from 1994 .

He began his journalistic career as a cultural correspondent for the daily newspaper The Globe and Mail . He later moved to the National Post , where he wrote on pop culture , music and film topics for three years . In October 2001 he started working as a freelance writer for Reuters in Kinshasa , Congo . O'Reilly then became a Reuters correspondent for the African Great Lakes area in Kigali , Rwanda . Step by step, he added his own photos to his reports.

In 2003, O'Reilly was involved in the making of the documentaries The Ghosts of Lomako (as co-producer) and The Digital Divide (as co-director and cameraman). After a trip to Darfur in 2004 he turned to photography . He was then promoted to Reuters' chief photographer for West and Central Africa, where he coordinated photo reporting from 24 African countries.

As a war correspondent , he documented the Second Congo War , the civil war in Chad , the Darfur conflict and the civil war in Libya in 2011 . As an embedded journalist , he was repeatedly deployed in the war in Afghanistan between 2008 and 2011 . In Martyn Burke with a Peabody Award winning documentary Under Fire: Journalists in Combat (2011), which was devoted to the psychological consequences of war reporting, O'Reilly came alongside other war reporters as Chris Hedges , Jeremy Bowen and Christina Lamb to speak.

After the deaths of his colleagues Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros in Libya, O'Reilly took a year off to study psychology and trauma . Since his position in Africa was no longer filled after that, Reuters sent him to Israel in 2014 , which O'Reilly initially hoped would be a less psychologically demanding job. However, after Operation Protective Edge began , he had to report on the daily attacks from the Gaza Strip . For O'Reilly, this was "the most brutal and unequal war" he had ever reported. This made him doubt the usefulness of his work. A few weeks later he was fired by Reuters for financial reasons.

O'Reilly was a 2013 Harvard Nieman Fellow , 2014 Ochberg Fellow at the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University , 2015 Yale World Fellow at Yale University , 2016 MacDowell Colony Fellow and Writer in Residence at the Carey Institute for Global Good .

Together with the former US Marine Thomas James Brennan , who also had traumatic experiences in Afghanistan, O'Reilly wrote the non-fiction book Shooting Ghosts. A US Marine, a Combat Photographer, and Their Journey Back from War , which was published in August 2017 by Viking Books / Penguin Random House.

O'Reilly's return to photography was not easy; initially he photographed fashion shows in Senegal . In 2019, O'Reilly was selected by the Norwegian Nobel Committee as the photographer of the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Abiy Ahmed , and in this role he was responsible for the pictures at the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize exhibition.

He then spent several months in the outbreak area of ​​the Ebola fever epidemic from 2018 to 2020 , producing the documentary Ebola In Congo for PBS Frontline about the doctors and nurses who are fighting the Ebola fever outbreak in the DR Congo .

During the COVID-19 pandemic , O'Reilly began his Congo in Conversation project to document the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak on the lives of the Congolese.

O'Reilly has received several awards for his work, including Press Photo of the Year for his picture of a mother with her child waiting for food in an emergency aid center in Tahoua during Niger's 2005 hunger crisis . In this context, O'Reilly pointed out several times that Ovie Carter's 1974 press photo had already documented the famine in the Sahel , but the situation of the people in Niger had not changed in the almost 30 years between these two pictures .

Finbarr O'Reilly lives again in Dublin after long stays abroad.

Awards (selection)

  • 2005: World Press Photo - Press Photo of the Year
  • 2005: National Press Photographers Association - Honorable Mention
  • 2007: UNICEF Photo of the Year - Honorable Mention
  • 2010: National Press Photographers Association - Portrait, 1st Place
  • 2011: National Press Photographers Association - International News Story, 3rd Place
  • 2019: World Press Photo - World Photo Contest, Portraits, Singles, 1st Prize
  • 2020: Carmignac Photojournalism Award

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  • with Thomas James Brennan: Shooting Ghosts. A US Marine, a Combat Photographer, and Their Journey Back from War. Viking Books / Penguin Random House, 2017, ISBN 978-0399562549 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f Finbarr O'Reilly . In: reportageatrifestival.it (archive version), accessed on April 19, 2020.
  2. ^ Sophie Chong: Ryerson Alumnus Finbarr O'Reilly chosen as this year's Nobel Peace Prize Photographer . In: ryerson.ca, accessed April 19, 2020.
  3. ^ Karon Liu: Rye grad shoots to top . In: theeyeopener.com of October 11, 2006.
  4. ↑ Finbarr O'Reilly . In: widerimage.reuters.com, accessed on April 19, 2020.
  5. ^ A b Carmignac Photojournalism Award 11th edition, Laureate: Finbarr O'Reilly . In: fondationcarmignac.com from April 2020.
  6. ↑ Featured photojournalist: Finbarr O'Reilly . In: theguardian.com of November 25, 2010.
  7. ↑ a b c Finbarr O'Reilly . In: dartcenter.org, accessed April 19, 2020.
  8. ^ Under Fire: Journalists in Combat (documentary channel hd) . In: peabodyawards.com, accessed April 19, 2020.
  9. ↑ a b c d Speech by Finbarr O'Reilly in The Power of Storytelling (video, 43:22 min, English) on December 22, 2017.
  10. ↑ a b c Joanne Laucius: Shooting Ghosts: Combat photographer Finbarr O'Reilly on trauma behind the lens . In: ottawacitizen.com of September 17, 2017.
  11. ↑ Shooting Ghosts: remembering war with Finbarr O'Reilly . In: carleton.ca, accessed April 19, 2020.
  12. ↑ Shooting Ghosts . In: shootingghosts.com, accessed April 19, 2020.
  13. ↑ Ingvill Bryn Rambøl: Finbarr O'Reilly is this years' Nobel Peace Prize photographer . In: nobelpeacecenter.org of October 17, 2019.
  14. ^ The Nobel Peace Prize Exhibition: Behind the scenes . In: youtube.com (video, 4:02 min, English) from January 30, 2020.
  15. ^ Congo in Conversation . In: congoinconversation.fondationcarmignac.com, accessed April 19, 2020.
  16. ↑ Finbarr O'Reilly - 2006 Photo Contest, World Press Photo of the Year . In: worldpressphoto.org, accessed April 19, 2020.
  17. ↑ UNICEF Photo of the Year 2007 . In: unicef.de, accessed on April 19, 2020.
  18. ↑ Dakar Fashion . In: worldpressphoto.org, accessed April 19, 2020.
  19. ↑ Carmignac Photojournalism Award - 11th edition . In: fondationcarmignac.com, accessed April 19, 2020.
personal data
SURNAME O'Reilly, Finbarr
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British-Canadian journalist, photographer, documentary filmmaker and author
DATE OF BIRTH 1971
PLACE OF BIRTH Swansea , Wales , United Kingdom