THE WORLD, IN POSITIVES

I stand at the entrance. Laurent Nkunda, leader of the CNPD party, sits behind a desk in his ramshackle office in North Kivu, DR Congo.

Behind me two rockets from the summer, launch into the blue skies of Gaza.

Like me, all the onlookers at the World Press Photo 2008 respond with awe, disgust, despair or a faint smile at each photograph. Currently on tour in London at the Royal Festival Hall at South Bank the exhibition has been a crowd puller.

Shooting at the warzone

Tim Hetherington's work from Korengal in Afghanistan transports you to a war zone.

These are photographs he clicked for Vanity Fair. "You perceive the world to be peaceful because your life is and then you begin to wonder," says Pierpaold Panfilo, a computer student and a photography enthusiast.

A photograph of a soldier wiping sweat off his forehead in Afghanistan won the World Press Photo 2008 award.

The world lens

There are winners in other categories too. Simple pictures of young girls from Turkey strike you. They've never been to school before and they're smiles are to die for. "All of them girls look so happy. They are so poor but so happy," marvels Louise Olareqvu, a primary school student.

My personal favourite are the pictures by Tim Clayton. Young boys jump off from a height playing Nagol. Nagol, is a sport in Pentecost, Vanuatu, that looks like bungee jumping, except, the nylon ropes are replaced with twigs from trees.

Pictures of Benazir Bhutto just before her assassination, a portrait of Putin or Qi Xiaolong's pictures of an ancient Chinese tradition of storytelling at tea houses never leave your mind.

Picks among pics

The idea started in 1955. This year’s photos come from all over the world. The exhibition has come to London and will travel to over 40 cities. 80,536 photographs were considered this year.

Gary Knight, the chairman of the jury, commented on British photographer Tim Hetherington’s photos on http://www.wordpressphoto.org/. “The image represents the exhausting of a man and the exhaustion of a nation,” said Knight.

Hetherington told The Independent in an interview, “I work consciously to find ways to close the gap between me and the person in the photograph,” he says.

Copyright issues, my vanity unfair and new found photographic vision push me to go for it. I click the reflection of the exhibition on the glass walls. World Press Photo 2009 winner? Probably not.