The portrait of “Mahmoud Ajjour (9)“, by the palestinian photographer Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times, has won the World Press Photo of the Year in the 2025 edition of the world’s most prestigious photojournalism competition.
In March 2024, Palestinian boy Mahmoud Ajjour was seriously injured while fleeing an Israeli attack in Gaza City. As he turned back to encourage his family to continue, an explosion maimed his arms.
The family was evacuated to Qatar, where, after receiving medical treatment, Mahmoud is learning to play with his phone, write, and open doors with his feet. Mahmoud’s dream is to receive prosthetics and live like any other child.
The war in Gaza has claimed an excessively high number of child casualties. The United Nations estimates that on December 2024, Gaza had the highest number of child amputees per capita in the world.
Photographer Samar Abu Elouf was also evacuated from Gaza in December 2023 and currently resides in the same apartment complex as Mahmoud Ajjour in Doha, where she has photographed some of the few seriously injured Gazans who, like Mahmoud, have managed to leave Gaza for medical treatment.
World Press Photo Executive Director Joumana Zein Khoury said: “It’s a discreet image that speaks loud and clear. It tells the story of a child, but also of a war whose impact will affect generations.”
John Moore and Musuk Nolte, finalists
In addition, the World Press Photo Foundation has selected, for the first time, two finalists for the Photo of the Year award, which we discuss below:
“Crossing by Night,” by John Moore (United States) for Getty Images, an image depicting Chinese migrants warming up in the cold rain after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. This otherworldly yet intimate image captures the complex realities of border migration, which are often downplayed and politicized in American public discourse.
“Drought in the Amazon” , by Musuk Nolte (Peru/Mexico) for Panos Pictures and Bertha Foundation. This photograph shows a young boy bringing food to his mother, who lives in Manacapuru, in the Brazilian Amazon. Previously, the village was accessed by boat, but due to the drought, he now has to walk two kilometers through the dry bed of an Amazon river. The striking contrast between the desert and drought landscapes in the world’s largest tropical forest highlights the alarming water shortage.
Global jury president Lucy Conticello, director of photography for M, Le Monde‘s weekend magazine, said: “When the global jury began selecting the various contenders for Photo of the Year, we had a broad selection from each of the six regions. From all the submissions, three themes emerged that define the 2025 edition of World Press Photo: conflict, migration, and climate change. Another way to think of them is as stories of resilience, family, and community.”
The World Press Photo exhibition in Barcelona
The Photo of the Year and the two finalists were selected by the global jury of World Press Photo 2025 from among all the regional winning photographs.
World Press Photo of the Year winner Samar Abu Alouf will participate in the activities of the World Press Photo exhibition in Barcelona, along with other award-winning photographers this year, such as Samuel Nacar and Maria Abranches (see the complementary activities here).
The Photographic Social Vision Foundation will organize this prestigious exhibition in Barcelona for the twenty-first consecutive year. It will be open to the public from November 7 to December 14 at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB), a co-producer of this event, which is primarily supported by the Banco Sabadell Foundation.
