A Visual Testament to the Times We Live In

Each year, the World Press Photo Contest becomes a mirror. Not a pristine, polished one—but one cracked, fogged, stained with truth. The 2025 edition reflects not only a year of political tumult and climate collapse, but the quiet revolutions of identity, resistance, and memory that rarely make front pages. Here, truth doesn’t whisper. It howls, bleeds, weeps, and sometimes, dances defiantly in drag under the radar of oppressive regimes.

The winners—42 photographers from 30 countries—were chosen not merely for aesthetic prowess but for their unflinching courage to look where most would rather scroll past. With more than 59,000 entries from nearly 4,000 photographers, the global jury—led by Lucy Conticello—sought not the prettiest images, but the ones that demand conversation.

The Fragile Theater of Power

Nothing encapsulates the brutal choreography of modern politics like Jabin Botsford’s image of Donald Trump being escorted offstage after an assassination attempt. Blood smeared, expression dazed, the former president is caught not in triumph but in a moment of raw, mortal vulnerability. The photograph, already iconic, is a study in contrast—masculine bravado punctured by reality. It documents not only a pivotal campaign moment but the theater of American politics itself, where performance and peril blur.

Equally haunting is Suvra Kanti Das’s portrait of upheaval in Bangladesh: a toppled statue, a collapsing regime, and rage rendered in stone and smoke. In a year when many democratic illusions cracked under pressure, these images become more than records—they are elegies for broken systems and catalysts for change.

Beauty in the Absurd

Photographer Anselmo Cunha’s image of a Boeing 727 marooned on a flooded Brazilian runway is surreal, mythic—like a Noah’s Ark grounded by bureaucracy. But the beauty of the shot is a Trojan horse: the flood it documents displaced half a million people. What Cunha captures is not catastrophe as spectacle, but the quiet terror of our accelerating environmental demise. The photo, suspended between sky and water, asks us to consider how the very symbols of progress now sit powerless before nature’s wrath.

Lives on the Margins, Brought to the Center

This year’s contest did more than chronicle disaster—it told stories rarely seen. Santiago Mesa’s heartbreaking photo-essay on suicides among Colombia’s displaced Emberá people is an act of witness journalism at its most intimate. The paruma shawls worn by grieving sisters become talismans of loss, memory, and cultural survival.

In Lagos, Nigeria, Temiloluwa Johnson gives us the underground drag ballroom scene—a defiant explosion of color, movement, and selfhood in a society where such expression is criminalized. The photograph, radiant with joy and resistance, is both protest and portrait. It’s not merely a celebration—it is survival.

War and Memory in the Post-Truth Age

Aliona Kardash’s “It Smells of Smoke at Home” might be one of the most quietly devastating projects. Capturing the manufactured reality of war exhibitions in Russia, her lens moves with Nabokovian melancholy—probing the space between memory and propaganda, homeland and exile. What does it mean to love a place that no longer resembles itself? Kardash doesn’t answer. She lets the ghost of home drift through her frames like smoke.

Meanwhile, in El Salvador, Carlos Barrera’s long-term project draws our eyes to families caught in a legal twilight zone—where constitutional rights have dissolved into recurring “states of emergency.” A mother with cancer clutches her sons’ portraits printed on a T-shirt. In that simple gesture lies an entire indictment of a nation’s moral collapse.

Borders, Real and Imagined

The act of crossing a border, once a geopolitical abstraction, becomes intensely physical in Ebrahim Alipoor’s work on Iranian kolbars. The terrain is treacherous. The stakes: survival. These men, criminalized couriers of basic goods, traverse mountain passes with refrigerators strapped to their backs—symbols of global inequality made absurdly literal.

John Moore’s depiction of Chinese migrants warming themselves after crossing the US–Mexico border is similarly rich in contradiction. Shrouded in rain and fog, their figures are at once ghostly and palpable. This is migration not as policy debate, but as lived experience—cold, wet, exhausted, and very, very human.

The Role of the Witness

We live in a time when it is easier than ever to look away.

– Said World Press Photo executive director Joumana El Zein Khoury.

And yet, these images demand our gaze. They challenge us to sit with discomfort, to dwell in nuance, to recognize our complicity—and our capacity for change.

The annual exhibition, which will travel to over 60 cities, becomes more than a showcase. It is a kind of global truth commission—reminding us that photography, when wielded with honesty and courage, is not passive. It is political. It is personal. It is power.