Local photojournalist Darrin Zammit Lupi has won the Yannis Behrakis International Photojournalism Award for 2021, with his project titled: The first photo I ever took of my daughter, and the last.

The project was published by Reuters back in April of this year, and consists of a series of photographs of Darrin and his daughter Rebecca, who he refers to as Becs, as she battled an aggressive form of cancer, during the global COVID-19 pandemic. Becs passed away earlier in January, 2021.

“I took the first photo of my daughter, Rebecca, moments after she was born on the 3 of august, 2005. Barely more than 15 years later, I took the last photo of my daughter moment after she died of cancer on the 3 of January, 2021,” said Darrin. “As a photojournalist, it was only natural that I’d documented just about every moment of the beautiful life of Becs, as my wife Marisa and I called her… Bec’s battle was made even worse by a global pandemic that brought paranoia over the possibility of infecting her compromised immune system, anxiety over medical supply chains, and worst of all, separation at a time when togetherness was what we needed most.”