A photograph taken by the director of Trocaire, Mr Justin Kilcullen, in North Korea has been selected by two of the world's leading news magazines as one of their pictures of the year.
In an unusual distinction for an amateur photographer, Mr Kilcullen's picture (above) was chosen by both Time and Newsweek magazines to illustrate the appalling famine in North Korea in their end-of-year editions.
The photograph of several starving boys framed in a doorway was first printed in The Irish Times in June, shortly after Mr Kilcullen returned from a fact-finding trip.
"The photo was taken just as I was leaving an orphanage near Sunchon City. The first thing that struck me as I arrived was the silence, quite the opposite of what you would expect approaching an orphanage or school," he said.
It was subsequently picked up by the Sygma photo agency in Paris, which agreed to pass on to Trocaire 60 per cent of the profits made from selling it. So far it has earned Trocaire more than £5,000 for its North Korean appeal.
Mr Kilcullen says he rarely takes photographs except for work, but adds that his training as an architect might have helped in the framing of the picture. "I suppose I was just in the right place at the right time." He used an Olympus 70 zoom, a typical family camera.
Since June, Trocaire has raised more than £2.5 million to alleviate severe food shortages in North Korea. This has been spent on maize, rice, high-energy biscuits, vitamins and blankets.
The highly-secretive Communist regime in the country has presided over economic collapse and nearfamine conditions since the Soviet Union broke up and bad weather destroyed the last three harvests.
