The image of the child Mahmoud Ajjour, nine, who lost his arms while fleeing an Israeli attack in Gaza, is the photo of the year 2025 of the World Press Photo contest. Taken in 2024 by the Palestinian photographer Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times, “It is silent” while “speaks high and clear.” It tells the story of a minor, “but also of a broader war that will have an impact during generations,” according to the executive director of the jury of the award, Joumana El Zein Khoury. This call coincides with the 70th anniversary of the award, and there are two finalists: the American John Moore (for Getty Images) and his Mexican colleague Musuk Nolte (for Panos Pictures, Bertha Foundation). They have reflected the migration and drought drama derived from the climate change, respectively.
The photo of the year is a child portrait of a child with a white tank shirt. Next to a window, the light illuminates its face, of deep sadness. Only after looking at him well, the spectator repairs in his arms: he has mutilated. He was injured in March 2024 while trying to escape with his family from an attack by the Israeli forces. An explosion left him like this and was evacuated with his to Qatar, where he received treatment. Ajjour needs help to eat and dress, and he is learning to use his feet to write, “participate in digital games on the phone and open doors”, according to the organizers of the contest.
Samar Abu Elouf, the photographer, was evacuated from Gaza in December 2023 and lives in the same apartment complex as the boy, in Doha, the Catarí capital. In his first reaction to knowing that he had won he has tried to highlight the difficulties of the injured Palestinians who are out of Gaza. “Children have paid a very high price for the horrors they have experienced, and Mahmoud is one of them,” he says. He lost his arms in a bombing when he fled with his family, “and his life is a challenge because he cannot assert himself and depends on his mother even for his basic needs.” Samar, who says “miss her family”, expects the award to help disseminate stories like this, “so that people understand better what is happening in Gaza.”
World Press Photo sources explain that “Mahmoud is one of the few serious injured who have been able to leave (from the strip) to receive treatment.” And that this image “does what the great photojournalism can do: provide an entry point to a complex story”, in the words of the president of the global jury of the contest, Lucy Conticello. According to the Committee for the Protection of Journalists (CPJ), an independent organization based in the United States, “the war between Israel and Gaza has killed more journalists during one year than any other documented conflict” by this NGO. Until last April 4, “165 Palestinians, six Lebanese and two Israeli, died.” Other countries with photographic series selected this year for World Press Photo also occupy low positions in the 2024 press freedom index, prepared by borders without borders. Among them, Myanmar, Bangladesh. Sudan, Venezuela and Russia.
John Moore, one of the finalists, has captured a group of Chinese migrants under a night rain after crossing the border between the United States and Mexico. The photo, published by Getty Images, is titled Nightlife, and those portrayed have waterproof and crowded next to an orange effect. For the jury, “this image is both supernatural and intimate” and represents “the complex realities of migration at the border, which is often simplified and politicized in political discourse in the United States.” The jury itself indicates that the exits from China have increased in recent years.
The other finalist is the Mexican Musuk Nolte, which publishes in the Panos Pictures agency (Bertha Foundation). The photo for which it has been distinguished is titled Droughts in the Amazon And he collects, on his back, a young man who carries food to his mother. The woman lives in the Brazilian people of Manacapuru, which could be reached in boat. Due to the absence of rain, his son, who carries with bags, goes barefoot and wears a white swimsuit and a hat, “he has to walk two kilometers through the dry channel of a river in the Amazon,” says the jury. The contrast between the desert soil in the largest tropical jungle in the world, “makes the water void disturbingly visible.” The Gazatí Mahmoud child, Chinese migrants and drought ravages reflect “resilience, family and community.” For Lucy Conticello, it is another way of seeing “the three themes of this edition of the World Press Photo: conflict, migration and climate change.”
In an additional section, there are two other selected winners, both from the Netherlands. Prins de Vos has been awarded for his portrait of a man named Mika, who has covered in his pocket the costs of gender reassignment surgery and hormonal treatment. Mika shows the great scar where his breasts were before, and the contest emphasizes “Las Largas Espeas” for consultations in this type of clinics. The author points out that “fostering a more inclusive and compassionate approach to gender statement.” The photographer Marijn Fidder has obtained the other recognition for a snapshot of the Uganda bodybuilder Tamale Safalu, who trains in front of his house, in Kampala. He lost a leg in a motorcycle accident in 2020, but has continued to compete and is the first disabled athlete who does it in Uganda against rivals that are not.
World Press Photo is an independent organization founded in 1955 and based in Amsterdam (Netherlands). It prohibits the use of images generated by artificial intelligence, both those of generative filling and those that are completely generated. The jury values this aspect and professionalism of photographers and the facts behind each story.
All awarded images, either in the photo of the year as in the global contest, failed last March, will be shown in more than 60 places in the world as part of an itinerant exhibition. Start this April 18 at Amsterdam and in Spain it can be seen in Seville (May 14-June 3); Vitoria (October 16-16); Barcelona (November 7, December 4); Madrid (November 13-December 8).