iN VIDEO: Haunting Kamloops residential school photo wins international award

A powerful photo of dresses hanging on crosses along a roadside in Kamloops has won a prestigious international award.

The World Press Photo Foundation announced the winners of the 2022 contest today, April 7.

Edmonton freelance photographer Amber Bracken’s photo titled Kamloops Residential School was taken in June 2021, for the New York Times.

The dresses and crosses lined the highway after 215 unmarked graves of children were discovered near the residential school. The dresses remained blowing in the wind for weeks as a tribute to the children who died at the school.

READ MORE: Dresses line highway as tribute to 215 children found at former Kamloops residential school

“It is a kind of image that sears itself into your memory," jury chair Rena Effendi said in a statement. “It inspires a kind of sensory reaction. I could almost hear the quietness in this photograph, a quiet moment of global reckoning for the history of colonization, not only in Canada but around the world.”

Bracken is a freelance photojournalist who photographs primarily across western North America to better connect to the global issues in her own backyard, according the World Press Photo site.

Her recent work has focused on the ongoing legacy of intergenerational trauma from residential “schools” for Cree and Metis youth, Wet'suwet'en reoccupation and land rights fights, the overrepresentation of un-housed Indigenous people displaced in their historic territories, and interrogating the impact of race in her own family, world press said.

“So we started to have, I suppose, a personification of some of the children that went to these schools that didn’t come home,” Bracken said in comments released by contest organizers.

“There’s also these little crosses by the highway. And I knew right away that I wanted to photograph the line of these crosses with these little children’s clothes hanging on them to commemorate and to honour those kids and to make them visible in a way that they hadn’t been for a long time.”

READ MORE: Kamloops residential school burial site confirms elders' stories of abuse: Tk'emlups Chief

The World Press Photo Awards is organized by the Dutch foundation World Press Photo and is considered one of the most prestigious and coveted awards in photojournalism.

For more of Bracken's work, click here. 

For more information about the World Press Photo Awards, click here. 

— With files from Associated Press

To contact a reporter for this story, email Shannon Ainslie or call 250-819-6089 or email the editor. You can also submit photos, videos or news tips to the newsroom and be entered to win a monthly prize draw.

We welcome your comments and opinions on our stories but play nice. We won't censor or delete comments unless they contain off-topic statements or links, unnecessary vulgarity, false facts, spam or obviously fake profiles. If you have any concerns about what you see in comments, email the editor in the link above.