The World Press Photo of the Year award is part of the World Press Photo Awards, organized by the Dutch foundation World Press Photo.
Considered one of the most prestigious and coveted awards in photojournalism, the World Press Photo of the Year is awarded to the image that "... is not only the photojournalistic encapsulation of the year, but represents an issue, situation or event of great journalistic importance, and does so in a way that demonstrates an outstanding level of visual perception and creativity."[1]
The jury, composed of 10 members, also assigns the World Press Photo Story of the Year to a multi-image story that explores a theme of social relevance distinguished by photographic intensity and importance of the content. The creators of the two main awards receive a cash prize corresponding to €5,000.[2]
In addition to the two main prizes, 3 single photo prizes and 3 story prizes are also awarded in each of eight categories.[3]
The following is a list of all winners of the Press Photo of the Year, and information on the respective images.
| Contest year | Photographer | Subject | Description | Web link | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1955 | Motorcycle racing | On 28 August 1955, at Volk Mølle Racetrack in Assentoft, Denmark, a motorcyclist crashes during a competition. | Image | ||
| 1956 | Coming home from the war | A German World War II prisoner is released by the Soviet Union and reunited with his 12-year-old daughter in West Germany, who has not seen him since infancy. | Image | ||
| 1957 |  Douglas Martin | Racial segregation in the United States | Accompanied by violence and harassment, Dorothy Counts becomes one of the first African American students at Harry Harding High School in Charlotte, North Carolina. | Image | |
| 1958 | No award given. | ||||
| 1959 | Stanislav Tereba | Football | During a football game between the teams Sparta Praha and Červená Hviezda Bratislava, Sparta's goalkeeper Miroslav Čtvrtníček stands on the football field in pouring rain. | Image | |
| 1960 | No award given. | ||||
| 1961 |  Yasushi Nagao | Assassination of Inejirō Asanuma | On 12 October 1960, the 17-year-old extreme right-wing student Otoya Yamaguchi kills the socialist politician Inejiro Asanuma with a sword during a speech in Tokyo's Hibiya Hall. | Image | |
| 1962 | El Porteñazo uprising in Venezuela | During the El Porteñazo military rebellion, a dying soldier clings to a priest with sniper fire all around them. | Image | ||
| 1963 | Malcolm Browne | Suppression of Buddhists in Vietnam | The Vietnamese monk Thích Quảng Đức sets himself ablaze in protest against the persecution of Buddhists by the government of President Ngo Dinh Diem. | Image | |
| 1964 | Don McCullin | Cyprus crisis of 1963–64 | A Turkish woman mourns her dead husband, victim of the Greek–Turkish civil war. | Image | |
| 1965 | Kyōichi Sawada | Vietnam War | A mother and her children wade through a river in Loc Thuong in the South Vietnamese province of Binh Dinh to escape US bombing. | Image | |
| 1966 | Kyōichi Sawada | Vietnam War | On 24 February 1966, American troops drag the body of a Viet Cong fighter behind their M113 Armored Personnel Carrier for burial, after he was killed in a fierce night attack by several Viet Cong battalions against Australian forces during the Battle of Suoi Bong Trang. | Image | |
| 1967 |  Co Rentmeester | Vietnam War | The gunner of an M48 Patton looks through his sight. This was the first colour photograph to win the award. | Image | |
| 1968 | Eddie Adams | Vietnam War | On 1 February 1968, the South Vietnamese police chief Nguyễn Ngọc Loan summarily executes Viet Cong prisoner Nguyễn Văn Lém on a street in Saigon with a bullet to the head. | Image | |
| 1969 | The Troubles | An Irish Catholic wearing a gas mask stands in front of a wall with the graffiti we want peace, moments before teargas is thrown by British troops. | Image | ||
| 1970 | No award given. | ||||
| 1971 | No award given. | ||||
| 1972 | Bank robbery in Saarbrücken | After a bank robbery in Saarbrücken, a shootout takes place between police and the bank robbers. | Image | ||
| 1973 | Nick Út | Vietnam War | The young Phan Thị Kim Phúc and other children flee with severe burns caused by napalm, mistakenly dropped by South Vietnamese planes. | Image | |
| 1974 |  Orlando Lagos | Coup in Chile | On 11 September 1973, president Salvador Allende appears shortly before his suicide in the presidential palace La Moneda during General Pinochet's military coup. Lagos's identity as the photographer was not revealed until February 2007, a month after his death. | Image | |
| 1975 | Ovie Carter | Sahel famine, Niger | A small child suffers during a drought in Niger. | Image | |
| 1976 | Stanley Forman | Fire Escape Collapse | During a fire in a Boston apartment building, the fire escape collapses and a woman falls down with her goddaughter. The woman died at the scene of impact. | Image | |
| 1977 |  Françoise Demulder | Lebanese Civil War | In January 1976, a group of Palestinian refugees flees civil war in Beirut. | Image | |
| 1978 |  Leslie Hammond | Apartheid | The South African police tear-gas a group of demonstrators in Modderdam, near Cape Town. | Image | |
| 1979 | | Sanrizuka Struggle | After years of protests against the construction of Narita Airport, which is ready to open when on 26 March 1978 serious clashes break out between demonstrators and Riot Police Unit. | Image | |
| 1980 | David Burnett | Fall of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia | In November 1979, in a refugee camp in Sa Keo near the Thai–Cambodian border, a woman holds her child in her arms. | Image | |
| 1981 | Mike Wells | Famine in Karamoja, Uganda | In April 1980, a white missionary in northeastern Uganda holds the comparatively tiny hand of a starving African boy. | Image | |
| 1982 |  | 23-F coup attempt in Madrid | On 23 February 1981 Lieutenant-Colonel Antonio Tejero speaks with a gun in his hand before the Spanish Congress of Deputies, holding hostage the government and MPs. | Image | |
| 1983 | | 1982 Lebanon War | On 18 September 1982, Palestinian corpses lie in the street in the aftermath of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, when Phalangist Maronite Christian militias killed Palestinian refugees. | Image | |
| 1984 |  | Earthquake in Turkey | On 30 October 1983, following a devastating earthquake in the vicinity of Erzurum and Kars, Kezban Özer finds her five children buried alive. | Image | |
| 1985 |  Pablo Bartholomew | Bhopal disaster | The body of a child, killed in a chemical accident at the plant of US chemical company Union Carbide Corporation, is buried. | Image | |
| 1986 | Frank Fournier | Omayra Sánchez | Sánchez, a victim of the Armero volcanic disaster, died after being trapped in a mud hole for 60 hours. | Image | |
| 1987 | / | AIDS | American AIDS patient Ken Meeks sits in a wheelchair. On his arms are numerous lesions caused by Kaposi's sarcoma. | Image | |
| 1988 | Anthony Suau | Election in South Korea | On 18 December 1987, a desperate mother in Kuro, South Korea leans against a riot policeman's shield and begs for mercy for her son, arrested during a demonstration. After the November election there were protests against the government, accused of electoral fraud. | Image | |
| 1989 | David Turnley | Earthquake in Armenia | In Leninakan, Boris Abgarzian grieves for his 17-year-old son, a victim of the Armenian earthquake. | Image | |
| 1990 | Charlie Cole | Tiananmen Square Massacre | A protester, later dubbed Tank Man, stops a group of People's Liberation Army battle tanks during the massacre in Tiananmen, Beijing. | Image | |
| 1991 | | Kosovo conflict | The family of Nashim Elshani grieves around his deathbed; he was killed while protesting for Kosovar autonomy. | Image | |
| 1992 | David Turnley | Gulf War | US Sergeant Ken Kozakiewicz mourns the death of fellow soldier Andy Alaniz, killed by friendly fire. | Image | |
| 1993 | James Nachtwey | Famine in Somalia | A Somali mother lifts up the body of her child, killed by malnutrition. | Image | |
| 1994 |  Larry Towell | Palestinian territories | Palestinian children raise their toy guns in the air. | Image | |
| 1995 | James Nachtwey | Rwandan genocide | Hutu man mutilated by the Hutu Interahamwe militia, who suspected him of sympathizing with the Tutsi rebels. | Image | |
| 1996 | Lucian Perkins | First Chechen War | A boy peers out of a refugee-packed bus fleeing fighting near Shali, Chechnya and heading for Grozny. | Image | |
| 1997 |  Francesco Zizola | Angolan Civil War | Young land mine victims play in the Angolan city of Kuito. | Image | |
| 1998 | Hocine | Algerian Civil War | A woman mourns the victims of a massacre in Bentalha, Algeria. | Image | |
| 1999 | Dayna Smith | Kosovo conflict | Relatives and friends comfort the widow of a KLA fighter, shot dead while on patrol the previous day. | Image | |
| 2000 | Claus Bjørn Larsen | Kosovo War | A wounded Kosovar Albanian refugee walks the streets of Kukës, Albania. | Image | |
| 2001 | Lara Jo Regan | Immigration to the United States | A Mexican immigrant works in order to feed her children. | Image | |
| 2002 | Erik Refner | Refugee disaster in Afghanistan | In the Jalozai refugee camp, the body of an Afghan boy is prepared for burial. | Image | |
| 2003 |  / | Earthquake in Iran | A boy holds the trousers of his dead father, killed in the 22 June 2002 earthquake. | Image | |
| 2004 | Jean-Marc Bouju | Iraq War | An Iraqi prisoner of war with a hood over his head comforts his son at a holding centre. | Image | |
| 2005 | Arko Datta | Indian Ocean earthquake | Two days after the tsunami, a desperate Indian woman mourns a relative killed in Cuddalore, Tamil Nadu. | Image | |
| 2006 | Finbarr O'Reilly | Niger food crisis | A mother and her child wait for food in an emergency center in Tahoua, Niger. | Image | |
| 2007 | Spencer Platt | Lebanon War | Five young Lebanese ride in a convertible through the rubble of a bombed South Beirut.[4] [5] | Image | |
| 2008 | Tim Hetherington | Afghanistan War | An exhausted American soldier leans against a wall and keeps his eyes covered. | Image | |
| 2009 | Anthony Suau | Subprime mortgage crisis | An armed officer moves through a home following residents' eviction as a result of mortgage foreclosure. | Image | |
| 2010 | Pietro Masturzo | 2009 Iranian presidential election | An Iranian woman shouting from a rooftop in Tehran in protest against the result of Iranian presidential elections held in 2009. | Image | |
| 2011 | Jodi Bieber | Taliban treatment of women | Bibi Aisha, 18, was disfigured as retribution for fleeing her husband's house in Oruzgan province, in the center of Afghanistan. At the age of 12, Aisha and her younger sister had been given to the family of a Taliban fighter under a Pashtun tribal custom for settling disputes. | Image | |
| 2012 | Samuel Aranda | Protests in Yemen, Arab Spring | A woman holds a wounded relative in her arms, inside a mosque used as a field hospital by demonstrators against the rule of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, during clashes in Sanaa, Yemen on 15 October 2011. | Image | |
| 2013 |  Paul Hansen | Victims of Operation Pillar of Defense | Grieving men carry to their funerals two-year-old Suhaib Hijazi and her three-year-old brother Muhammad, killed by an Israeli missile strike in Gaza City that killed their father, Fouad, and critically injured their mother. Taken 20 November 2012. | Image | |
| 2014 | John Stanmeyer | African migrants | Migrants on the shore of Djibouti City raise their cell phones in an attempt to capture an inexpensive signal from neighboring Somalia. | Image | |
| 2015 |  Mads Nissen[6] [7] [8] | Homophobia in Russia | The photo shows a gay couple during an intimate moment, reminding the beholder that life for lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT) people is becoming increasingly difficult in Russia. | Image | |
| 2016 |  | European migrant crisis | A nocturnal image showing a man passing a baby through a barbed wire fence on the Serbia–Hungary border, namely between Horgoš (Serbia) and Röszke (Hungary). | Image | |
| 2017 | Burhan Ozbilici | Assassination of Andrei Karlov | The photo shows police officer Mevlüt Mert Altıntaş standing next to Andrei Karlov, the Russian Ambassador to Turkey, moments after he shot him in the back. Altıntaş shot Karlov to protest Russia's involvement in the Syrian Civil War. | Image | |
| 2018 | Ronaldo Schemidt | Crisis in Venezuela | José Salazar, 28, catches fire amid violent clashes with riot police during a protest against president Nicolás Maduro, in Caracas, Venezuela. Salazar was set alight when the gas tank of a motorbike exploded. He survived the incident with first and second-degree burns. President Maduro had announced plans to revise Venezuela's democratic system by forming a constituent assembly to replace the opposition-led National Assembly. | Image | |
| 2019 | John Moore | Immigration policy of Donald Trump | A Honduran toddler cries as she and her mother are taken into custody by US border officials in McAllen, Texas. | Image | |
| 2020 | Yasuyoshi Chiba | Sudanese coup d'état | The photo shows a young man reciting protest poems during a nightly power cut in Khartoum on 19 June 2019. He is surrounded by numerous people who illuminate him with their mobile phones and chant slogans for the restoration of civilian rule. In a time of violence and conflict, the jury chairman deliberately chose a photo that symbolises hope and does not depict war and violence. | Image | |
| 2021 | Mads Nissen | COVID-19 pandemic | The image shows the first hug Rosa received in five months due to the coronavirus. In March, nursing homes in Brazil closed their doors to all visitors due to the COVID-19 pandemic, preventing millions of Brazilians from visiting their elderly relatives. Assistants were ordered to keep physical contact with vulnerable people to a minimum. A cuddle curtain was used to safely allow hugging.[9] | Image | |
| 2022 | Amber Bracken[10] [11] | Kamloops Residential School | The photo shows children's clothing hung on crosses commemorating the more than two hundred children who died of maltreatment, neglect and disease at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia. | Image | |
| 2023 |  Evgeniy Maloletka[12] [13] | Mariupol hospital airstrike | The photo shows a pregnant woman who was seriously injured in the shelling of the clinic and is carried away by helpers. Short time later, the woman and the unborn child are dead. | Image | |
| 2024 | Mohammed Salem[14] [15] | Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip | The photo shows a woman holding the body of her niece, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike in Khan Yunis. | Image | |
| 2019 | | The Migrant Caravan | During October and November, thousands of Central American migrants joined a caravan heading to the United States border. The caravan, assembled through a grassroots social media campaign, left San Pedro Sula, Honduras, on 12 October, and as word spread drew people from Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. | Story | |
| 2020 | | Kho, the Genesis of a Revolt | Young people make up more than half of Algeria's population, and according to a UNESCO report 72% of people under 30 in Algeria are unemployed. Pivotal moments in Algerian history, such as the 'Black October' revolt of 1988, have had angry youth at their core. Black October was harshly suppressed—more than 500 people were killed in five days—and was followed by a 'black decade' of violence and unrest. | Story | |
| 2021 | Antonio Faccilongo | Habibi | Habibi, which means 'my love' in Arabic, chronicles love stories set against the backdrop of one of the longest and most complicated conflicts in modern history. The photographer aims to show the impact of the conflict on Palestinian families, and the difficulties they face in preserving their reproductive rights and human dignity. | Story | |
| 2022 | Matthew Abbott | Saving Forests with Fire | |||
| 2023 | Mads Nissen | The Price of Peace in Afghanistan |