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2022 World Press Photo Contest global winners announced

25 apr, 2022

The World Press Photo Foundation is proud to present the 2022 World Press Photo Contest global winners.

“Together the global winners pay tribute to the past, while inhabiting the present and looking towards the future,” states Rena Effendi, global jury chair.

The World Press Photo Contest recognizes the best photojournalism and documentary photography of the previous year. This year, the winners were chosen out of 64,823 photographs and open format entries, by 4,066 photographers from 130 countries.

WORLD PRESS PHOTO OF THE YEAR

Red dresses hung on crosses along a roadside commemorate children who died at the Kamloops Indian Residential School, an institution created to assimilate Indigenous children, following the detection of as many as 215 unmarked graves, Kamloops, British Columbia, 19 June 2021.

2022 World Press Photo of the Year, Kamloops Residential School by Amber Bracken, Canada, for The New York Times

WORLD PRESS PHOTO STORY OF THE YEAR

Saving Forests with Fire

Matthew Abbott, Australia, for National Geographic/Panos Pictures

Indigenous Australians strategically burn land in a practice known as cool burning, in which fires move slowly, burn only the undergrowth, and remove the build-up of fuel that feeds bigger blazes. The Nawarddeken people of West Arnhem Land, Australia, have been practicing controlled cool burns for tens of thousands of years and see fire as a tool to manage their 1.39 million hectare homeland. Warddeken rangers combine traditional knowledge with contemporary technologies to prevent wildfires, thereby decreasing climate-heating CO2.

2022 World Press Photo Story of The Year, Saving Forests with Fire by Matthew Abbot, Australia, for National Geographic/Panos Pictures

WORLD PRESS PHOTO LONG-TERM PROJECT AWARD

The Amazon rainforest is under great threat, as deforestation, mining, infrastructural development and exploitation of other natural resources gain momentum under President Jair Bolsonaro’s environmentally regressive policies. Since 2019, devastation of the Brazilian Amazon has been running at its fastest pace in a decade. An area of extraordinary biodiversity, the Amazon is also home to more than 350 different Indigenous groups. The exploitation of the Amazon has a number of social impacts, particularly on Indigenous communities who are forced to deal with significant degradation of their environment, as well as their way of life

2022 World Press Photo Long-Term Project Award, Amazonian Dystopia by Lalo de Almeida, Brazil, for Folha de São Paulo/Panos Pictures

WORLD PRESS PHOTO OPEN FORMAT AWARD

Through personal stories, Blood is a Seed (La Sangre Es Una Semilla) questions the disappearance of seeds, forced migration, colonization, and the subsequent loss of ancestral knowledge. The video is composed of digital and film photographs, some of which were taken on expired 35mm film and later drawn on by Romero’s father. In a journey to their ancestral village of Une, Cundinamarca, Colombia, Romero explores forgotten memories of the land and crops and learns about her grandfather and great-grandmother who were ‘seed guardians' and cultivated several potato varieties, only two of which still mainly exist.

2022 World Press Photo Open Format Award, Blood is a Seed by Isadora Romero, Ecuador

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