As a photo editor, I see many stories every day, all day; they come to me in all shapes and forms via a number of different delivery methods. As professionals our eyes and minds are trained to make sense of what we are looking at. We sometimes forge lasting relationships with some of the images we see. When the global jury came together in Amsterdam, as World Press Photo prepared for its 70th anniversary celebration, a table was overflowing with past yearbooks. Flipping through them, I took a trip down memory lane looking for the photographs that had made a lasting impression on my youthful self and shaped the world view of a budding professional.
The world, it appears, has always been on fire. Stories of environmental disasters, global climate change and human conflict have never left the front pages of the news through all those years. However, the way news is presented and delivered has changed: in 2025, 5.24 billion, or 63.9 percent of the world’s population use social media, according to the Digital 2025 Global Overview Report. A number of these users participate in the dissemination of what we can no longer call ‘information’: wild ideas, incendiary opinions, or unchecked factoids repackaged as humorous snippets by more- or less divisive interests groups.
As historian Timothy Snyder states: “To abandon facts is to abandon freedom.” This statement has always resonated deeply with me, so distinguishing between communication, politically motivated influence, biased opinions, and facts has always been the heart of my everyday struggle.
During the two-week judging period, I was surprised by how much I craved and found solace in books. As we worked on the award, picking up a book, rather than checking social media became an almost physical necessity. It is as if books acted as a remedy to the news stream. They forced me to slow down, and repackage “streams” into “arguments”, and “facts” into “stories”, helping me connect the dots into a first draft of tomorrow’s history. With this in mind, I returned to my role as jury chair with two ideas in mind: the public needs to get better at reading images, and these photographs from all over the world need to be made available to as large a public as possible.
Pictures can package larger amounts of information and convey complex stories in a single frame. I learnt this while working at the International Herald Tribune, when on slow news days I would be looking for “floaters” to rise to the front page. Pictures that could stand alone and redirect the readers toward a story placed deep inside the paper. I understood then that some pictures are built in layers. Pictures are efficient that way.
Photojournalists are essentially journalists with a camera. The photographs, along with the captions photographers write, give us reliable information about, for example, the complex geopolitical risks or the economic implications of predatory capitalism on the livelihoods of people and their communities. Photojournalists make stories more tangible; they bring to life the people and lives being written about. Captions cover the when, where, what, and who, but most importantly turn these facts into histories by trying to get to the why. Pictures are never just images.
Meanwhile the advent of AI on the one hand, and the slow restructuring of the photo market on the other, mean that editors deal with an ever-growing number of images whose reliability is increasingly in question. And because trust is essential in our trade, collaborating with reporters and photojournalists on the ground, working in the field and doing their own original research and reporting is essential; knowing the people behind the bylines is essential. Pictures are made by people.
World Press Photo’s regional model defines categories by the place where they come from: the pictures awarded are no longer categorized by topics, but came to us by region. This shift has put a different sort of pressure on members of the jury, requiring that they – and not the categories – ensure a balance between different kinds of images, much as we would collectively in the newsroom. Should we highlight sports or armed conflicts? Environmental issues or cultural achievements?
We made our choices with an eye on the final mix: as much as a World Press Photo Contest award is an immense recognition for photographers, often working under difficult circumstances, it is also a recap of the world's major events. Yet, what we have here is just a partial overview. Not all the events that were topical in 2024 were covered by the photographs submitted, but the jury selected images, I believe, fully aware of their power, and of the legitimacy that the award will lend them. My hope is that tomorrow’s lawyers, reporters, policy makers, will be affected and moved by these images, and that perhaps they will strike a chord in some of today’s 11 year-olds, who, having forged the beginning of a relationship with them, will continue their life journey knowing that pictures, and the stories they tell, matter.
For more information about why each 2025 World Press Contest awarded work was selected by the independent jury, read the jury report.
