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We have no escape – Saher Alghorra, winner of the 2025 humanitarian Visa d’Or award
Displaced Palestinians arrive in the northern Gaza Strip after Israel’s decision to allow thousands of them to go back for the first time since the early weeks of the war with Hamas, in January 2025
Photograph: Saher Alghorra/Zuma Press/Visa Pour L’Image
After the Aral Sea – Anush Babajanyan
The rusting remains of a boat near the North Aral Sea in Kazakhstan, 2019. Once the fourth-largest lake in the world, the Aral Sea has lost 90% of its volume since the 1960s due to Soviet-era irrigation projects that diverted its tributaries to support agricultural activities in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan
Photograph: Anush Babajanyan/Visa Pour L’Image
Reshaping home: Indonesia’s capital migration – Cynthia Boll, winner of the 2024 Canon female photojournalist grant
Demolition in Kampung Akuarium, North Jakarta, where more than 1,000 residents have been displaced to make way for a sea wall and a tourist development. Boll looks at Indonesia’s decision to move its capital as a turning point. Faced with the prospect of Jakarta continuing to sink, the government chose a radical path: to build a new capital city from scratch, Nusantara, in the forests of East Kalimantan, on the island of Borneo
Photograph: Cynthia Boll/Visa Pour L’Image
The Iraqi Captagon and synthetic drug crisis – Alfredo Bosco, winner of the 2025 Ville de Perpignan Rémi Ochlik Visa d’or award
Al-Ataa rehabilitation hospital in Sadr City, Baghdad, July 2023. Iraq is experiencing a surge in drug trafficking, prompting authorities to implement stringent measures. Captagon (fenethylline) is produced in Syria, and Iraqi authorities say crystal meth (methamphetamine) is produced in laboratories in Iran
Photograph: Alfredo Bosco/Ronin/Visa Pour L’Image
Afghanistan: In the Shadow of the White Flags – Sandra Calligaro, recipient of a 2024 Françoise Demulder grant
A traditional restaurant in the Shahr-e Naw district in the centre of Kabul, April 2025. Women are not allowed to sit in the main room. Men can only bring daughters who have not yet reached puberty. ‘As a theocracy was gradually established, I tried to document women’s tragic daily lives: their confinement, but also their resilience,’ Calligaro said. ‘I wanted to paint the portrait of a subjugated society which is trying to adapt and resist increasingly repressive laws.’
Photograph: Sandra Calligaro/Visa Pour L’Image
El Salvador – Juan Carlos
Gang members prepare to leave their cell before it is searched by prison guards at the Terrorism Confinement Centre, where there are between 15,000 and 20,000 inmates. It is the largest prison in the western hemisphere and houses members of El Salvador’s three main gangs – Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), Barrio 18 Revolucionarios and Barrio 18 Sureños
Photograph: Juan Carlos/Visa Pour L’Image
Forty years of social photography – Jean-Louis Courtinat
Soup is distributed at the Ungureni orphanage in Romania, 2000. For almost 40 years, Courtinat has been driven by the challenge of photographing ‘sensitive subjects with sensitivity’
Photograph: Jean Louis Courtinat/Visa Pour L’Image
A Nation Decides – Julia Demaree Nikhinson (AP)
Donald Trump raises his fist as he arrives at the Republican national convention in Milwaukee, July 2024
Photograph: Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP/Visa Pour L’Image
California: A Decade in the Middle of the Inferno – Josh Edelson (AFP)
A firefighter battles flames approaching homes during the Creek fire in Madera County, September 2020. Since 2015, Edelson has been covering California’s wildfires for AFP. Trained in safety protocols by firefighters, he often operates autonomously in extreme environments, and has documented the dramatic increase in wildfires in the American west
Photograph: Josh Edelson/AFP/Visa Pour L’Image
Lionheart: The Story of Saleh – Deanne Fitzmaurice
Saleh plays basketball to try out his new prosthetic arm with his brother Ali (left) and a friend in Oakland, California, December 2015. Lionheart documents this Iraqi boy’s life, spanning 20 years between an event that changed the course of his life and the present day
Photograph: Deanne Fitzmaurice/Visa Pour L’Image
The Fall of Assad – Salwan Georges (Washington Post)
A mosque’s minaret is visible through a ripped poster of Bashar al-Assad at the former regime’s state security headquarters in Damascus, Syria, January 2025. Since December 2024, Washington Post staff photographer Salwan Georges has travelled several times to Syria to report on the country’s reckoning with its past and its uncertain future
Photograph: Salwan Georges/Washington Post/Visa Pour L’Image
Kashmir. Wait & See – Cédric Gerbehaye
Shkoor, 55, a gold prospector, has just finished working with his sieve in the Ishkoman River near the village of Pakora, Ghizer district, Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan. Recent Chinese investment in the region as part of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor is likely to boost industrial mining in the region
Photograph: Cédric Gerbehaye/National Geographic/Visa Pour L’Image
Ukraine, Surviving Amidst the Ruins – Gaëlle Girbes, winner of the 2024 Pierre and Alexandra Boulat award
Larissa, her daughter and their neighbours try to put out a fire that is heading towards their homes in Kamianka, Kharkiv oblast, August 2024
Photograph: Gaëlle Girbes/Visa Pour L’Image
American Madness – Adam Gray
Robert John Burck, better known as the Naked Cowboy, performs outside Trump Tower in New York as supporters gather the day after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in July 2024. Since witnessing the storming of the Capitol on 6 January 2021, the photographer Adam Gray has documented current affairs in the US, from Trump supporters to the Mexican border
Photograph: Adam Gray/New York Times/Visa Pour L’Image
The Eye of Gaza – Fatima Hassouna
Gaza Strip, May 2024. Fatima Hassouna died on 16 April when an Israeli bomb killed her and all her family, reducing the family home to dust. She had just turned 25. These were her words: ‘I don’t have a resume / To recognise two eyes / Mysterious / And I believe / I do not have a story / One / Clear / So that a stranger believes it. / And he believes. / I do not have any defining physical characteristics / To fly / Beyond this gravity / And I believe. / Maybe I am announcing my death now / Before the person in front of me loads / Their sniper rifle / And finishes their work. / So that I may finish. / Silence.’
Photograph: Fatima Hassouna/Visa Pour L’Image
Photographer Unchained – Jean-Pierre Laffont
A child employed as a street vendor in Istanbul, Turkey. Laffont, touched by the suffering of child workers, chronicled their plight in 12 countries over the course of one year
Photograph: Jean-Pierre Laffont/Visa Pour L’Image
DRC: living under M23 – Paloma Laudet (Item)
A family of internally displaced people in Mugunga camp, Goma, February 2025. Fighting in recent years has led to the displacement of almost 650,000 people to unsanitary camps
Photograph: Paloma Laudet/Collectif Item/Visa Pour L’Image
Uncontrollable megacities – Pascal Maitre
Kulunas in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo, 26 May 2025. Kulunas are ultra-violent gangs who terrorise the city. The gang members, who are between 17 and 30 years old, are organised in cartels that fight each other to control territories
Photograph: Pascal Maitre/Visa Pour L’Image
Madagascar, Land of Spirits – Rijasolo (Riva Press for Géo France)
A mpanazary (shaman) is held while they are believed to be possessed by a spirit, Madagascar 2016. Each year, the mpanazary go to a sacred hill near Mangalaza to appeal to the ancestors’ spirits to bring rain to help the harvests
Photograph: Rijasolo/Riva Press for Géo France/Visa Pour L’Image
Do I Know You? – Eugene Richards
A US second world war veteran displaying his military decorations for bravery. Richards said: ‘This exhibition is a sharing of photographic stories that speak of America, of survival, the shadows cast by slavery, crime, imprisonment, poverty, incomprehensible loss, the longing for love, and what it means to be beautiful.’
Photograph: Eugen Richards/Visa Pour L’Image
A Lifetime in Photography – Stephen Shames
Black Panthers by the side of the stage at a ‘Free Huey’ rally in DeFremery Park, Oakland, California, 1968. ‘What interests me is not someone’s starting point, but their journey,’ Shames said. ‘My journey as a photographer started during the 1960s when I was a student at the University of California at Berkeley. I got to know the leaders of the anti-Vietnam war and the Black Power movements, including Bobby Seale, co-founder of the Black Panthers, who became a mentor. Seale and the Panthers taught me how to see a community that was not my own from the inside’
Photograph: Stephen Shames/Polaris/Visa Pour L’Image
Feed the Planet – Georges Steinmetz
At the end of August, 600 sheep descend from pastures above the Aletsch glacier in the Valais region of the Swiss Alps. After a retreating glacier cut off the annual migration route, this narrow path was blasted out of a canyon wall in the 1970s to maintain access to the pasture
Photograph: George Steinmetz/Visa Pour L’Image
Virunga: 100 years – Brent Stirton (Getty Images)
Georgette Ndovya Kavugho, 32, was attacked by members of the Allied Democratic Forces, an Islamist group that has established ties with Islamic State. The image is part of a project on Virunga national part in DRC
Photograph: Brent Stirton/Getty Images/Visa Pour L’Image
The war against Islamic State in Somalia – Carolyn Van Houten (Washington Post)
A man sits on wreckage from a suicide bomb attack involving 12 suicide bombers supported by 60 fighters that took place on 31 December 2024 in Dharjaale, Puntland, Somalia. Van Houten and the Post’s Nairobi correspondent Katharine Houreld travelled to Somalia in January, touring an ever-expanding battlefield in Puntland
Photograph: Carolyn Van Houten/Washington Post/Visa Pour L’Image
Ukraine – Marion Péhée, recipient of the Canon female photojournalist grant
From left to right: Vala, Vova, Sergueï, Masha, Kostia and Nina talking on a bench in Shchastia, Luhansk oblast, July 2016
Photograph: Marion Péhée/Visa Pour L’Image
