Mahmoud Ajjour was just nine years old when both his arms were severed during an Israeli attack on Gaza City. Three months later, in July 2024, the self-taught photojournalist Samar Abu Elouf took a moving photograph of the young boy. The image was named World Press Photo of the Year 2025—the most sought after title in the worlds of documentary photography and photojournalism—and was quickly reproduced by major news outlets around the world.
Within the history of the World Press Photo awards, this is in many ways a familiar narrative: a shocking image of a child, desperately injured in the midst of a devastating conflict, becoming an international symbol for the suffering of his or her people. But in other ways this image tells a different story. Elouf is not a man or a Western image maker, and Ajjour and his family are not strangers to her—they met and bonded in Doha, after all were evacuated there from Gaza.
The questions of who documents the suffering of others, which stereotypes these images can perpetuate and why, in an age of constant image dissemination and consumption, this matters more than ever, are central to World Press Photo’s newly opened anniversary exhibition, the aptly named What Have We Done? Unpacking 7 Decades of World Press Photo. The show sets out not just to explore the impact of an award which, through its winners’ work, has undoubtedly shaped public understanding of the world, but to ask what harm may have been caused in the process. It does so via some of history’s most recognisable images: Don McCullin’s 1964 portrait of a Turkish woman desperately mourning her husband, Eddie Adams's 1979 photograph of an armed school teacher during civil war in Rhodesia, and Steve McCurry’s 1992 landscape of the burning oil fields of southern Kuwait.
Steve McCurry, Camels search for untainted shrubs and water in the burning oil fields of southern Kuwait. As his army retreated from Kuwait, at the end of the First Gulf War, Saddam Hussein ordered the ignition of the oil fields that scatter the country. The effect was an ecological disaster of unimaginable scale. Steve McCurry: 'Photographing the ecological disaster in the aftermath of the Gulf War was one of the most amazing experiences of my professional life. All of Kuwait seemed like an end-of-the-world scenario from a Hollywood production. Over 600 oil wells were on fire, turning daytime into night. The smoke was so thick that sometimes you couldn’t breathe. Animals were left to wander among the burning oil fields, looking for food and water. I followed this family of camels for about an hour in my jeep, getting out from time to time to make photographs. I guess my motivation was to show the world this tragic, needless catastrophe.' (World Press Photo retrospective Children's Jury exhibition, 2003) (1991)
Steve McCurry USA, Magnum Photos for National Geographic
For Tara Pixley, a US-based visual journalist and ethics consultant at the Photography Ethics Centre, the harms associated with documentary photography date back to the inception of the camera, when it was a tool used to rationalise colonisation, subjugation and other atrocities. “That lineage has remained implicitly written into the structure of photojournalism, however unintentional it might be,” she says. “The aesthetics, practices and ethics of Western photojournalism have traditionally been primarily controlled by wealthy white men and it has been that singular background and perspective that has dominated how Western news audiences viewed non-white people.”
World Press Photo is no stranger to concerns around the over representation of white men. In 2020, the organisation was accused of “structural racism” after the announcement of a new managing director—a white man who replaced another white man—brought to light its then exclusively white supervisory board. The Indian photojournalist Chirag Wakaskar told The Art Newspaper at the time: “Visual journalism organisations like World Press Photo refuse to come to terms with their white supremacist narrative and the patriarchal systems they have thrived on.”
The following year, the Amsterdam-based prize announced the introduction of an International Advisory Committee, which is currently staffed by John Fleetwood, a Johannesberg-based educator and curator; Mark Sealy, the executive director of London’s Autograph gallery; the Iranian photojournalist Newsha Tavakolian and the Indian curator and photo editor, Tanvi Mishra. The move, introduced alongside awards for regional winners by the organisation’s then newly appointed executive director, Joumana El Zein Khoury, was intended to offer a more global balance of perspectives.
Roosje Klap, the director of Noorderlicht—the host of this year’s exhibition—with World Press Photo 2025’s curator Cristina de Middel and the organisation’s executive director Joumana El Zein Khoury
Photo: World Press Photo
It is fair to say that, at least on paper, this decision has led to change. According to Khoury, when she took up her post five years ago, almost 80% of World Press Photo award winners came from Europe and North America, and around 90% were men. In 2024, out of 61,062 entries by 3,851 photographers from 130 countries, these figures were 62% and 77% respectively.
But this is not just a matter of statistics—as Pixley points out, it is not just who takes the photograph that matters, but how it is taken. “There are benefits of having both insider and outsider perspectives in photojournalistic work and we do need both,” she explains. “The problem is when people of any background are bringing their implicit biases and lack of knowledge and or understanding to the visual work they’re doing. That is how stereotypes, inaccuracies and damaging visual rhetoric are made and then globally circulated as fact, through the validating structures of news organisations and awards.”
World Press Photo’s controversies and ethical quandaries, however, also stretch beyond the make up of its staff and winners. In 2025 the organisation apologised after describing two images by different photographers, one of a traumatised Ukrainian child and one of a wounded Russian soldier, as a pair. In the same year, it suspended the attribution of authorship for its 1973 winning image, commonly known as “Napalm Girl”, after claims emerged that it was not taken by the photojournalist Nick Ut, as had been accepted for more than 30 years. And this year, Khoury says, instances of photographers using artificial intelligence to remove noise from their images were up 30% on 2024, leading some images to be removed from the competition.
2024 was also the year that the organisation’s top award was given to the Palestinian photographer Mohammed Salem, whose image of Inas Abu Maamar, a Gazan woman cradling the body of her niece, has since become an internationally recognised symbol of conflict in Gaza. However, at the time the award was criticisedfor selecting the tightly cropped photograph, and for placing the importance of “art” above that of context.
In an X post dated 20 April 2024, the production director, Benjamin Chesterton, perhaps better known in the photography world for the critiques and opinions he shares under the handle @duckrabbit, wrote: “It simply raises the question why the image was selected? Why [Maamar’s] agency isn't considered? Why it's OK to make competitions out of profound suffering instead of finding better ways to honor those in the pictures AND if needed those taking them?”
Perhaps surprisingly, Khoury has previously posed a similar question to herself. When first taking on her role, the executive director wondered whether the World Press Photo awards—providing recognition and cash prizes to photographers returning from Gaza or Ukraine for what are often highly distressing images—are still valuable in today’s world. ”Is it decent? Is it indecent?” she asks.
In the end, Khoury decided that amid increasing conflict and censorship around the world, the awards are indeed still valuable, both to photographers and to the public. However, this in turn begs another question: how does World Press Photo—and by extension the photojournalism community it exists to celebrate and support—reflect on the errors of the past, and move towards a more ethical future? While there may not be one correct answer to this vast problem, Khoury hopes that What Have We Done? will play a large role in exploring the many possible solutions.
Referencing the exhibition, she says: “There are a lot of images here that are very recognisable in people's imaginations and, even though I really don't like this word for an image, they are very ‘iconic’ in people's minds. This is what the exhibition, and especially the curation by Christina de Middle, have really tried to steer away from, to put the main focus not on the ‘iconicness’ of the image, but on how our archive reflects how we see the world.”
Eddie Adams, White life in Rhodesia:. A school teacher walks home after her car broke down. On 3 March 1978, after 14 years of civil war, Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith and bishop Abel Muzorewa of the United African National Council signed an agreement, which became known as the Internal Settlement. In 1965 Smith, prime minister of the British colony since 1964, had declared Rhodesia unilaterally independent under white minority rule. The declaration not only sparked international outrage and economic sanctions, but also a guerrilla war against white rule by different political and military factions. By signing the Internal Settlement and organizing new democratic elections, it was expected that all sanctions would be lifted. However, the settlement was condemned by the United Nations' Security Council, and as not all significant parties had been involved in the process, the civil war continued. The war would not end before December 1979, when in Lancaster House, London, all parties came to a peace agreement and a new constitution, guaranteeing minor rights (1979)
Eric Bouvet, France, Gamma
To this end, Middel, a celebrated photojournalist and member of Magnum Photos since 2022, has organised the exhibition around six visual patterns found throughout World Press Photo’s archive: Weeping Women and Men Rescuing, Emotional Soldiers and Debris, Being a Man and Being a Woman, Black Skin and The Dark Continent, Silhouettes and Shadows - The ‘Wow’ Moment and Fire and Smoke. In a statement, the curator says: “This exhibition is an invitation to rethink not just how our visual language has evolved but how we, as viewers and citizens, should be learning to read images with a sharper and more critical eye. If history repeats itself—and it does—then the way we narrate it has to evolve.”
Khoury explains that, behind the scenes of the organisation, there are continuous conversations around this evolution—around which images and photographers should be celebrated and why, and how text accompanying these images should be written and presented. She describes these discussions as almost more important than the photographs themselves. “We've really tried to be vulnerable, we've tried to be open, we've tried to ask difficult questions,” she explains.
For her part, Pixley, who recently co-authored the book Critical Photojournalism: Contemporary Ethics & Practices, says she has been impressed with Khoury’s leadership to date, and agrees that the way forward for World Press Photo lies in open dialogue, and in engaging collaboratively with difficult ideas. “If the organisations who have the most power and prestige in the photojournalism industry commit to making space for such conversation, commit to the process of imaging new ways of producing, engaging and valuing news photography, then I believe we have an excellent chance of improving this vital profession,” she explains. “An ethic of care is not just the future of photojournalism, it is the only way forward from a history of harm done.”
- What Have We Done? Unpacking Seven Decades of World Press Photo, the Niemeyerfabriek, the Netherlands, until 19 October
