A family eats while its members look at each other with apparent normality, surrounded by the remains of what was their home: walls, doors, and barely a few fragments of the roof, in a Gaza completely in ruins. As if trying to maintain some order within the most generalized disorder. Another family, many kilometers away, tries to engrave that last shared look, that last skin-to-skin contact, before being brutally separated by ICE in the United States. An elderly woman looks at the domestic robot that sits in front of her and keeps her company in a nursing home, to prevent loneliness from taking over her days. A young woman closes her eyes and collapses during her mother's funeral, who died from injuries caused by shrapnel from a shell in the conflict between India and Pakistan.
These are some of the 144 images that star in the World Press Photo exhibition, which can be visited until December 13 at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB). Photographs taken in multiple countries, contexts, and from very different perspectives, but which share a common characteristic: the power of the gaze. Accomplice, elusive, frontal, or profile gazes. Closed eyes. Hurt, sad, and even indifferent gazes. Expressions that transmit pain, violence, and rage.
In an exhibition that brings together the photographs that have marked an entire year, selected from more than 57,000 images submitted by more than 3,000 professionals from 141 countries, it is inevitable to find some of the themes that have also dominated the news: conflicts, wars, displacements, violence, and humanitarian crises. However, few images show this violence directly. There is hardly any blood, bombings, or weapons, but it is there, latent, in each and every one of the gazes that run through the exhibition.
Looks that, although sometimes not directed directly at the viewer, force us to confront realities that we often, whether due to physical or emotional distance, tend to turn our backs on. However, it is enough to stop before some of these images for their expressions to pierce us, make our skin crawl, and bring us closer to what we rarely want to see: the armed conflicts in Ukraine, a Gaza reduced to ashes and rubble, rapes, the devastating effects that wars leave even years after their end, racism, or closer realities, such as forest fires, the deterioration of the population's mental health, or the loneliness that many elderly people feel.
Situations, all of them, that are part of the current world, but to which we often prefer not to pay attention, or whose existence we are not even aware of. However, when these images pierce us, it is impossible to keep looking away. And that is precisely one of the functions of photojournalism that World Press Photo has been defending for more than two decades: its ability to denounce and make visible different realities, putting them in the spotlight of public debate. Because it is not until we see those images, until we put a face to the people behind the figures, that we manage to empathize.
"Photography acts as a bridge between those whom the media usually reduce to mere figures and society, bringing their testimonies closer to humanize them," said Spanish photojournalist Diego Ibarra during the presentation of this edition of World Press Photo. Awarded for his work Kidnapped Education, it shows the devastating and often invisible effects of armed conflicts on such basic rights as education. Since 2011, the photographer, son of a teacher and father of an 11-year-old boy, has documented this crisis in nine countries, from Colombia to Afghanistan.
But the impact of these images can go even beyond denunciation. Some also contribute to changing the realities they document. This is the case of the series Moon Dust, by photographer Mohamed Mahdy, which portrays the situation of a village near his hometown. There, a community of more than 30,000 residents lives in what is known as Moon Valley, less than 15 meters from a cement factory that covers their homes with toxic dust and causes diseases, from asthma to different types of cancer and irreversible respiratory damage, also among children. The project has not only made this reality visible, but has also contributed to obtaining medical and legal aid for the affected families, including that of the photographer himself, who also suffers from asthma.
However, approaching these realities also comes at a cost for those who document them. Ibarra recalled that violence is exercised not only against those who are looked at, but also against those who look: photojournalism is increasingly a dangerous profession. Last year alone, 93 journalists were murdered while practicing their profession, as the exhibition warns in its final section. Along with these figures, several infographics remind us that freedom of expression, however much it is often taken for granted, is still denied in many countries.
Stop, look and question
These photographs also achieve a significant milestone: they invite us to stop. Every day thousands of photographs, videos and images pass before our eyes, whether on the computer, mobile or even on the street, so stopping to observe is not an easy task. In addition to stopping, they also force us to understand those who look at us from the other side of the camera and to question our own reality and the information we have about the world we live in.
Stop, look and question. These are also the three main ingredients that Silvia Omedes, founder and director of the Photographic Social Vision Foundation —an entity that this year celebrates its first quarter century—, considers essential in photojournalism. "A good image has to inform us, that is, inform us of a reality; it has to move us and, above all, it has to interrogate us: it has to make the audience work and intellectually challenge them," she explained.
She says it with knowledge of the subject. Not only does she direct an entity dedicated to promoting documentary photography, but she is also responsible for bringing the World Press Photo to Barcelona for the twenty-second consecutive year, in co-production with the CCCB and with the collaboration of the Sabadell Foundation. And this year, Omedes has also been part of the global jury of World Press Photo 2026. A process she describes as "exhausting," due to the "emotional cost involved" in reviewing images that confront us with realities that are not always easy to face directly.
The injustice of those who should administer justice: the photograph of the year
"Every year we see the winners as a reflection of the world we live in and the issues that occupy humanity today," said Marta Echevarria, exhibition curator for the World Press Photo Foundation. Among the themes of this edition are armed conflicts and their consequences in Gaza, Ukraine, India, Syria, or Sudan; the environmental crisis and the effects of climate change; citizen protests in different parts of the planet; mental health and human resilience even in the most devastating contexts.
Among them, the photograph of the year condenses one of the great paradoxes of this century: those who should administer justice are also those who end up exercising injustice. Taken inside one of the few federal buildings in the United States where photographers are allowed access, the image captures a heartbreaking moment: a family is separated when agents of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detain the father. The daughter clings to her father's shirt, trying to hold him in a last gesture, not knowing when—or even if—they will see each other again. The image largely condenses the World Press Photo exhibition: a situation of institutional violence that does not need to show blows or blood to be heartbreaking, but with a single glance and a gesture, that of a daughter to her father, it can be heartbreaking.
In addition to violence, the exhibition also features, in several photographs, the human capacity to adapt and even normalize the most adverse situations. This is the message conveyed by Aaron Favila's series Wedding in the Middle of a Flood, in which a family tries to celebrate love and preserve the memory of what should be one of the happiest days of their lives, with their feet submerged in the water that has flooded the Philippines due to Typhoon Wipha.
That same capacity for adaptation is observed in one of the images from Saher Alghorra's series Witnesses in Gaza. In it, a family tries to eat as if the world around them were not already destroyed, trying to maintain some normality in the midst of a reality they did not choose. Gaza is once again the protagonist of one of the finalist photographs, Humanitarian Emergency in Gaza, by Saber Nuraldin, which shows how several Palestinians line up for a humanitarian aid truck as it enters the Gaza Strip to get flour. A scene that, without directly showing violence, once again reveals it in all its rawness.
The other finalist is The Trials of the Achí Women, by Víctor J. Blue, which portrays Doña Paulina Ixpatá Alvarado alongside other Achí women in front of a Guatemalan court, after learning of the 40-year prison sentence for their aggressors for rape and crimes against humanity.
Glimpses that challenge us closely
The stories collected by World Press Photo come from all corners of the planet, but some challenge us from a much closer reality. This is the case of Brais Lorenzo, with his series Burned Earth, which portrays the forest fires in Galicia, his homeland. More than 200,000 hectares were burned there during the summer of 2025, the most severe fire season recorded in Spain in the last three decades. Lorenzo is accustomed to working with fire, which can even be beautiful from a photographic point of view, but whose impact on the territory is devastating.
It's not just about human victims: there are also destroyed lands, displaced families, and disappearing businesses. "I believe we should feel any injustice as our own anywhere in the world," the photographer remarked. In his case, however, that personal component is added. "The camera acts as a filter, but in this case, it's my land, my people, and our natural heritage," he lamented. In fact, many of the photographs were taken just a few meters from his father's native village.
With Lorenzo, three Spanish photographers have been honored this year by World Press Photo. Another is Diego Ibarra, with his images on the consequences of armed conflicts on education in different countries. The third is Luis Tato, with the series Generation Z Protests in Madagascar, which portrays youth mobilizations in the country. In one of the images, a young man with his face covered, a Naruto t-shirt, and a One Piece flag participates in the protests.
Whether they challenge us closely or from afar, photographs bring us closer to lives and realities that, otherwise, might remain outside our field of vision. They remind us that no conflict occurs in an alien world, that behind every news story there are people and perspectives. That is the power of photojournalism that World Press Photo champions: to force us to stop, question what we see, and prevent what happens before our eyes from going unnoticed.