People and Culture Category Winner

The View from Here
by Michelle Yagi

 

"This scene instantly drew my attention as it was so drastically different from the world I’m used to. I really felt as though there was a story to be told here, and that it was one that is told not nearly often enough. Taking the picture forced me to confront this vision of poverty that many people find all too easy to ignore. When I traveled to Shanghai on a school trip, the first thing I noticed after stepping off the bus was that while our comfortable-looking hotel stood on one side of the street, there was abject poverty on the other. The sickening contrast really prompted me into thinking about how privileged we are as Canadian students, and about how it’s easy to sympathize when hearing about problems half-way across the world, but it’s a completely different experience to be faced with them. I wondered what it must be like for the man in this picture to have to wake up every day and stare at the hotel across the street – the representation of a world so close yet so far removed from his own. I wanted to take a picture that would provide an insight, however small, into his side of story."