61st World Press Photo Contest Winners Announced

The best in international photojournalism has recently been announced by World Press Photo's Annual Photo Contest. 

The jury, ranging from photographers in the United States to Singapore and Turkey, "needed to consider an event or issue that was significant in 2017 and then a photo that best represented that event or issue" in order to choose the winning images. The winning photographs cover issues and events you may know well, like gender transformation, and others you may have never heard of, such as the Rohingya Refugee Crisis or the Marathon of the Sands in southern Morocco. 

From bloodied, dead bodies laying in the street to tourists enjoying a foreign experience, the winning images cover a broad spectrum of human (and animal) emotion. Personally, I think photojournalism is one of the most raw and pure forms of photography there is today. Capturing genuine stories and emotion while keeping in mind the principles of art and photography is no easy task. One thing I noticed while poring over the winning images is how all of them made me feel a response strong enough to separately look up each individual issue or event in an effort to want to take action because of what I saw and felt in the images. I think that this very fact is what makes photojournalism so fascinating: when viewing these photographs, we're not just viewing carefully choreographed moments composed in a studio and heavily edited in post-processing. We are viewing events that comprise human history and hopefully cause us, as viewers, to spur to action. 

Please visit the 2018 Photo Contest gallery to view the images. 

Cover photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash, used under Creative Commons.