Every year this time comes. And every year I wonder if I am ready to watch.
Today the World Press Photo has announced the forty-two regional winners of its 69th edition—the largest and most prestigious journalism photography competition on the planet. This year, candidates were 57,376 photographs, and leafing through the press kit was, once again, a breathtaking experience.
War. Violence. Despair. Bodies. Cities reduced to rubble. Animals killed. If you look for smiles among the award-winning images, you can count them on one hand—maybe.
And yet, this is precisely why World Press Photo exists.
Photography as testimony
The president of the Global Jury 2026, Kira Pollack, he said something that got to me hit really “This is a crucial moment—for democracy, for truth, and for the question of what we, as a society, are willing to see and denounce, and what we are willing to ignore.”
Here. This sentence summarizes everything.
Among the award-winning works is also “Tanner's Song” by Jahi Chikwendiu for the Washington Posta shot depicting a couple looking at their daughter's ultrasound pictures together. Tanner, the father, died of cancer at thirty years old — forty-one days after the baby's birth. It's a silent, intimate, devastating photograph. The kind of image you don't forget.
What happens now
Regional winners were selected in a first stage by six independent juries, and then evaluated by a global jury. The Photographer of the Year 2026 will be announced on April 23.
The winning photographs will then be exhibited in over sixty locations worldwide, starting from the historic New Church in Amsterdam — reaching millions of visitors.
One thing I think every time
There is something strange and necessary about looking at these images seated on the couch, with the phone in hand. DOn one hand, it almost seems irreverent towards the courage of those who took them. On the other hand, that's precisely the point: that those images arrive here, to us, in our daily lives.
Photography makes no sense if it remains confined to a hard drive. It makes sense when it disturbs. When it forces you to look. When it transforms a stranger thousands of miles away into someone you can no longer ignore.
The World Press Photo does this every year. And every year it reminds me why I love — and fear — this profession.
Photographer of the Year will be announced on April 23, 2026. The traveling exhibition will open in Amsterdam.
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