The World Press Photo Foundation has announced the regional winners of its photojournalism and documentary photography contest, including 24 international projects, one of them is a report on monarch butterflies by Spanish photographer Jaime Rojo. In addition, the Foundation has presented six honorable mentions in the contest and the jury has exceptionally added two special mentions to two photographers whose pictures show people – Israeli in one case, Palestinian in the other -, both immersed in scenes of dramatic deadly attacks.
In addition to the war between Israel and Palestine, other topics reflected by the winning stories are the climate crisis or family ties.
The four global winners, including the World Press Photo of the Year award, will be announced on April 18, 2024.
Winners who already know the World Press Photo Exhibition in Barcelona
The executive director of the World Press Photo Foundation, Joumana El Zein Khoury, stated that “this year’s selection includes stories of despair, hunger, war and loss, but also of perseverance, courage, love, family, dreams… and more butterflies that no one could imagine.”
The mention of butterflies is precisely a reference to the work “Saving the Monarchs”, by Jaime Rojo for National Geographic, about how people in Canada, United States and Mexico are working together to recover the monarch butterfly population, that migrates between their countries and that has been reduced by 80% in recent decades, due to industrial agriculture and climate change. The Spanish photographer Jaime Rojo, specialized in nature, already attended the exhibition in Barcelona as a guest in 2017, when he won another World Press Photo award.
In addition, among the 2024 regional winners there are also new works by the Brazilian Lalo de Almeida and the South African Lee-Ann Olwage, who accompanied us in recent editions of the Barcelona exhibition with a talk about “Amazon Dystopia” (the deforestation of the Amazon) and about “The Big Forget” (photography and mental health), respectively.
When will the exhibition come to Barcelona
All regional winners will exhibit their work at the World Press Photo 2024 exhibition in Barcelona, which can be visited from November 8 to December 15.
Organized for the twentieth consecutive year by the Photographic Social Vision Foundation, again at the CCCB – Center de Cultura Contemporània of Barcelona, with the main collaboration of the Banco Sabadell Foundation, the exhibition will once again feature international guests, complementary activities and guided tours for the regular public, school groups and also companies. Tickets will be available next October.
Know who the regional winners are
You can consult here all the Regional Winners of World Press Photo 2024 in the categories of Single Photographs, Stories, Long-Term Projects and Open Format for each of the 6 territories in which the contest divides the global participation (Africa – Asia – Europe – North and Central America – South America – Southeast Asia and Oceania).
The award-winning photographs were selected from among 61,062 images by 3,851 photographers from 130 countries. First, they were judged by the six regional juries and then the winners were chosen by a global jury, made up of the presidents of the regional juries together with the president of the global jury: Fiona Shields, head of photography at The Guardian:
“These final selected works are a tapestry of our world today, centered on images that we believe were made with respect and integrity, that can speak universally and resonate far beyond their origins,” says Fiona Shields. “This is an opportunity to applaud the work done with courage, intelligence and ingenuity by press photographers and documentary filmmakers around the world, and to amplify the importance of the stories that have been told, often from unimaginable circumstances.”
In total, counting the Honorable Mentions and the two special mentions, this year 32 projects by 33 photographers have been awarded (a winning work in the African region, carried out by a team of two photographers, Felipe Dana and Renata Brito, who share the award).
Topics of the regional winners of World Press Photo 2024
- The war between Israel and Hamas: The Asian winner in the Single Photographs category shows a Palestinian woman holding the body of her niece, who was killed when an Israeli missile hit her home. The jury considered it an important reminder of how irreversible personal loss is beyond the statistics of war.
Furthermore, as we mentioned at the beginning, this year the jury also made the exceptional decision to include two special mentions with which it wanted to “reflect the seriousness of the war between Israel and Hamas in 2023, the extreme suffering of civilians and its global political impact. While each photograph shows a single individual after a horrific attack, the contrast between the scenes helps viewers understand the different scales of devastation, without minimizing individual suffering. We also want to pay tribute to the photographers reporting on this war, who are subject to enormous amounts of trauma, risk and personal loss, particularly in Gaza.”
- The Climate Crisis: The Selection shows how photographers are working urgently not only to show the effects of the climate crisis and activism against the causes of this crisis, but also to document everything that is being lost. A connection can be made, for example, between young German activists fighting to prevent a coal mine from destroying local communities and a grandfather in Fiji holding his grandson firmly in chest-deep water in a rising ocean.
- Family: Among the stories selected by the jury are stories of families facing illnesses such as cancer or dementia, the challenges of migration and trauma due to wars, disasters and losses. In all cases, the strength of these relationships and the photographers’ care for the people they photograph can be perceived in the images.
